The Nature of Change

Signal to Noise (Terry 12)

My pad chimes.

It does it again.

I whip my arm over to hit it and turn off the alarm, but it keeps dinging.

"Whaaaa..." I wonder groggily, rolling over in the warmth of my bed and tilting up the screen to see what it is.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL APPROACH SITUATION - URGENT UPDATE

PROCEED TO CCCDF FOR COORDINATION AND TASKING

Shit.

The aliens did something.

This can't be good.

I wheel my legs over the side of the bed, springing up and pulling on the jumpsuit I left on the ground for this specific occurrence. One quick zip to seal the front. I grab my pad and my backpack, slip into my shoes, and I'm out the door like a flash, sprinting down the hallway.

My path winds through the maze until I reach the Centralized Command and Control Dispatch Facility. - or, as everyone calls it now, the Nerve Center. A few others trickle in at their own paces, but all urgently. A wiry, spectacled kid who can't be more than twenty holds the door open, nodding as I pass in ahead of him.

The room is dark, the only light being cast in a strange stark neon-white glow from the main screen.

Upon the screen is cast an image of the ship, its bladelike form oh so familiar.

But this time... it's angry.

Four enormous loops of glowing orange fury spread out from around the axis of the main drive. They must be radiators, spewing the vast heat the ship produces into the void. The drive's fusion reaction itself burns with the force of a thousand suns packed into a tiny cage of fragile metal and equally raging magnetic fields.

I proceed to my spot, eyes locked on the display, looking for new details across the hull. I slip into the chair, spotting bulky Dennis McAllister to my right. We've grown close over the past days of work, although I still sense an undercurrent of something more sinister gnawing at him that he's hiding.

"What's the word?" I ask.

"The pulse rate of their drive just spiked, and their pulse energy spiked even harder. Suddenly people on the ground are spotting it, and there's mass panic."

"Shit... that's not going to go well, is it..."

Out of the corner of my eye I spot Xavier Kirkland, the lanky mining engineer who sits to Dennis's right, swinging awkwardly into his chair. I flash a quick wave in his general direction. He swings into his chair, looking worried.

"It's a lot scarier," he says after a moderate pause.

Dennis nods.

We watch intently as Kelly Tavson takes the stand yet again. She pulls the microphone towards her utilitaristically unadorned face, planting her legs firmly on the podium with a slight separation. A part of me idly wonders where she is most of the time; since the introductory tour, I haven't seen her except during these meetings in the Nerve Center.

"Time is short and I'll be brief," she begins.

"The alien vessel has been spotted by amateur telescope operators on the ground, now that it's running hot. It's all over the news. We're going to be linking up with some of the people on the surface to leverage them as a think tank for analysis. A lot of people have a lot of theories, and we don't want to let a metaphorical diamond in the ruff slip through the cracks.

"But the reason we're here is because everyone on the surface noticed something terrifying."

I subconsciously lean in closer, suddenly intrigued. I catch almost the entire room doing the same thing out of the corner of my eye.

"See, this image here isn't an image. It's a video."

She turns around, gesturing toward the screen with the mic, and it starts to animate.

"While it looks like it runs constantly at a glance, the main drive is pulsed. It ignites the nuclear fusion reaction by slamming two pellets of fusion fuel together in a repurposing of the main mass driver, but that's beside the point here. The point is, we can tell when they ignite a pulse, and we can tell how long the fusion fuel burns for."

"Where's she going with this?" Dennis wonders, leaning over and whispering in my ear.

"I have no idea..."

Tavson continues. "And they used the drive to transmit Morse Code, containing the words...

"We are here."