The office complex on Bernardo Avenue, Northern California, looks more like a hotel than a scientific research facility. The courtyard is spacious and filled with magnolia trees in full blossom. The grass that divides the tiled pathways is a deep, lush green. Potted plants are strategically placed to give visitors the impression that they grow there by choice. Although it might not look like the home of one of the world’s most ambitious experiments, it felt like it. Bernardo Avenue is the home of the SETI institute. That is, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Since 1984 they have sent a continuous mixture of probes and radio-signals into deep outer-space in an attempt to elicit a response from intelligent life. They have of course, found nothing.

Today was no exception.

Those who work for SETI remain undeterred by their lack of success. They show up every day, optimistic and determined.  The air is rife with a mixture of anticipation, tension and terrible coffee. The pressure to succeed in such in an environment is always keenly felt by all of its employees, but none felt it more than the current director, Dr. Boris Fletcher.

Boris had just been fired, along with his entire staff. He was so shocked by the sudden dismissal, that he hadn't even been capable of debating it.

“Yes sir, I understand. Have-”. The line went dead before he had even finished.

It was the phone call he had been vaguely dreading, but never thought would come. He shook with adrenaline and cursed aloud as he replayed parts of the conversation in his head.

“We understand this news comes at a bad time for you Boris, and I apologise on behalf of the entire committee here.”

Bad news never comes at a good time, thought Boris bitterly. If it did, it would just be called news.

Boris sat down heavily and swore again. His cheap office chair squeaked in protest at his large frame and several papers on his desk shifted slightly as the air settled. He ran his fingertips along his head, several inches below where his hairline actually was. It was a nervous habit left over from his younger years. He rested his head in his hands for a moment and reviewed his instructions. Aldous Franklin, the man on the other end of the phone, had been quite clear on how the SETI program was to be shut down.

The reasoning behind the decision was logical, if not a little defeatist. In the fifteen years since a third of the Amazon rainforest had burnt down in 2026, climate change had seized planet Earth in a death-grip that was tightening every month.

The lungs of the Earth had choked as fires raged uncontrolled for a record-breaking fifth year. The rainforest turned into a carbon bomb, accelerating climate collapse. In 2033, An unrelenting heatwave smothered North India, pushing wet-bulb temperatures beyond human survivability. The rich fled to air-conditioned domes while the poor suffocated outside, dying in the hundreds of thousands.

 Two years after that, saltwater intrusion caused by the ever-melting polar icecaps began to poison freshwater reserves in island nations. Kiribati and Tuvalu ceased to exist, their populations becoming the world’s first climate refugees with no home to return to. Only six months ago, America had finally felt the effects of the climate catastrophe on home soil, as a historic drought in the U.S. Midwest wiped out wheat and corn harvests. Supermarket shelves emptied, and riots broke out as food prices skyrocketed.

All of this strain on the global supply chain of resources meant that developed nations had struggled to generate sufficient power to maintain the standard of living that their still-growing populations had become accustomed to. The removal of electric billboards, increase in solar and wind generators as well as replacing traffic lights with roundabouts and a thousand other power-saving solutions had helped; But the grid was still under immense demand from electric trains and busses, among many other things.  A blind search for alien life that relied on thousands of computers and enormous amounts of broadcasting power to blast radio waves into the depths of the cosmos were hard to justify to a government that was struggling to generate enough power to sanitize drinking water. Essentially, programs like SETI, which sapped gigawatts of power every minute of the day had been deemed an unnecessary excess at this time. Boris wouldn’t be finished working today, however. He wouldn’t even be finished by the end of the month. Like most space programs, SETI wasn’t based purely in the United States. Having sites that could send and receive signals from multiple points on the planet had been deemed essential for maximising their chances of success. SETI had facilities of varying sizes and sophistication in sixty-two countries. Although they all powered their own facilities, it was the American government that footed the bill and repaid each local site in power credits, which had replaced carbon-credits in 2027.

Franklin had given Boris the heart-breaking task of visiting every site and supervising their immediate shutdown, starting with their headquarters here in California. With a heavy heart, he pressed the call button for his assistant, and began drafting a decommission letter.

*

Seven months later, Boris was on a 747 that had just touched down in Sydney, Australia. He was exhausted in every conceivable way. Shutting down over seventy facilities and firing more than three thousand people, mostly face-to-face, had taken its toll on him. Boris had once experienced the middle-aged spread common to most men in their fifties, but most of the fat from around his gut and jowls had vanished from sleepless nights and stress. His hair had thinned out more since he began this hellish task last November than it had in the ten years prior to that. His blue eyes now looked grey and pale, surrounded by dark circles. He rubbed the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and sighed.

“Last one” he said through chapped lips, his voice hoarse. Aeroplanes always dried him out. The recirculated air made him feel like starfish that had been washed up on the beach.

He had considered quitting initially. Send someone else to do your dirty work, he had fumed.But after that first day, when he had called his entire staff into the briefing room and delivered the crushing news to his colleagues, he had changed his mind. After that meeting had finished, he felt compelled to be the one to deliver the news to the rest of the organisation. He supposed it was his own ego, a vital step in accepting his failure. A captain ought to go down with his ship, sort of thing.

So here he was, sixty-one countries later and only a two-hour drive separated SETI from being shut down forevermore. He was lost in thought as the various announcements were made throughout the cabin and he disembarked. He moved through the terminal robotically and barely blinked at the smiling customs official who welcomed him to Australia.

He met his driver, a portly man who looked only slightly less dishevelled than Boris, who was holding a sign saying FLETCHER. He climbed into the back of a black sedan after a mutually mumbled greeting. As they pulled out of the airport, Boris turned on his phone. It connected to a provider called OPTUS almost immediately and an email notification came through. He didn’t recognize the sender’s name until he had opened it and read the message. It was from a junior SETI staff member he had spoken to in Japan. The man’s name was Taka and he and Boris had talked about SETI over a beer at the hotel, after the official decommission earlier in the day. Taka was not a physicist but an extremely talented signal operator, recruited directly from the Japanese navy where he had been in charge of detecting radio waves to locate enemy submarines. He had many innovative ideas and his passion was contagious. It had rekindled a sort of hope in Boris. If not in SETI itself, at least in the young scientific community. Taka had told him that there were key issues with the overall search parameters that SETI dictated to its foreign sites and these issues were potentially holding them back. Taka said it was difficult to explain the specifics to someone who wasn’t well versed in radio-wave propagation, but it was something he had been working on for some time. Boris had told Taka his dedication was admirable, but it hardly mattered anymore. Taka had only nodded and said something in Japanese “Nana korobi, ya oki”. Boris had graduated from beer at this point and was well into his exploration of a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and so had only nodded politely at the foreign comment before retiring for another sleepless night.

Apparently, Taka had had some sort of breakthrough, because the email was radiant with excited energy. It read;

Mr Fletcher,

It is me, Taka Akagi, from SETI in Japan.

If you have still not given up, and can find someone who will help you, there is something you should try now that you are in Australia. You need to find their High-Frequency farm, and direct them to receive skywave from the southern pole. You also need to time it so that the origin of the signal is at night. I have found a frequency that is consistent, but too weak to read from any site here in Japan. There are two things that are possibly occurring. When a signal reaches the upper atmosphere here on Earth, if it is below twenty megahertz it will bounce off the ionospehere layer of the atmosphere and be reflected as a skywave. If it is too weak to bounce, it will be lost and dispersed in a process known as “scattering”. I believe, that if any signals from outer space are below twenty megahertz they are scattering when they hit the upper atmosphere. However, when the sun does not strike the ionosphere, it shrinks, and loses what they call the C and D layers. Once it is this thin, combined with the already large hole in the ozone layer above the southern pole, I believe that a signal of this frequency range could get through and be received. We have no SETI site in Antarctica, so using the Australian site is possibly our best chance. It would only take two weeks to undertake this experiment. Please, Mr Fletcher, if you can.

Nana korobi, ya oki

“Fall down seven times, get up eight”.

Taka.

Boris was stunned. It seemed plausible. He appreciated that the concept had been significantly dumbed down for him, although he understood a few of the key principles. A High-Frequency farm was a large area covered with antennas designed to receive waves between 3-30 Megahertz. A “skywave” was some sort of HF signal. There was an attachment on the email that specified angles for the antennas to be set to, and the length to which they should be set. HF theory was the most difficult radio frequency to master, as it relied on low power and specifically tailored antennas. He had heard radio technicians refer to it “the Dark Arts”, due its unpredictability and reliance on operators having a “feel” for its application. But, it also travelled the furthest through open space on very low power. The more he read, the quicker Boris’s heart began to thump in his chest. It felt to him like it was the first time it had beat since that day in November.

He could put off shutting down the Sydney site for two weeks. He would see this through. This final experiment would be his swan song. Bet it all on red, he thought with a grin.

It didn’t take two weeks, it took five, but he managed it. Virtually everyone at the Sydney site had been ecstatic to be a part of SETI’s final project. The preparations had been made and the antennas had been tailored to Taka’s specifications. But the signal never came.

They monitored the spectrum around the clock for thirty-seven days, and nothing was picked up. Then, Aldous Franklin started calling. He demanded to know why Sydney hadn’t been shut down. When Boris told him the truth, Franklin had exploded. He immediately boarded a flight and came there himself. He was baying for blood and was delighted to have an excuse to fire Boris and cut him off from his severance pay.

Boris refused to abandon his last search. He and three lab technicians were alone in the control tower when Franklin stormed the room with armed guards, commanding them to power down their monitors. Boris had been practically living there, with a week-log beard and a dirty, borrowed t-shirt on, he looked almost mad.

Boris saw the guards, and Franklin’s red face bellowing orders. He became strangely calm. He took his hands off the chair he was sitting in and stood up. His final act as director of this project would be one of defiance, in the pursuit of truth. He took two steps towards Franklin, in an effort to stall him, the lab techs looked nervously at each other, were they expected to fight armed guards for this crazed director?

Franklin glared at Boris.

“You’ve lost it, Fletcher. You’ve burnt all your bridges with this shit”.

Boris shrugged.

“I had to try, Aldous. It’s my life’s work. It’ll always be my life’s work”.

Franklin laughed.

“SETI was a pipe-dream Boris! For Christ’s sake, looking for aliens!? We have people, here on Earth who need our best minds working on keeping us alive, right now.”

Franklin directed his attention to one of the lab techs who had moved behind Boris, as though to defend him.

“Listen, kid. This project? It’s... beyond futile. In the half century this thing has been running, do you know how much we’ve covered? Hmm?”

The lab tech shook his head.

“A bathtub” answered Boris, still looking directly at Franklin.

Franklin nodded.

“That’s right, Boris. If the entire known universe was all of the Earth’s oceans, then SETI has covered about as much area as a fucking bathtub. Are you happy to ruin your professional reputation for a bathtub?”

“Damn straight” said Boris.

He lunged for the door and was immediately tackled to the ground by two of the guards. Franklin was yelling something now, and the three lab techs all sat down abruptly. Boris continued to struggle, one of the guards managed to clip his wrist into a handcuff. Boris immediately squirmed onto his back and kicked out hard. Suddenly, a two-tone beep cut through the chaos.

Everyone in the room froze. There, on the monitor, was the most implausible sight imaginable. Perfectly ordinary in any control room besides this one. A sight that the human race had waited fifty-five years to see. On the small, HF display screen there was the unmistakable crest of a received transmission, with only two variations in width, indicating the binary wavelength of Morse code.  

Boris shook a guard’s hand off his neck without taking his eyes from the screen. He staggered to his feet. The handcuff dangling from his wrist was the only sound in the room. Franklin’s mouth was agape. Boris slowly walked towards the radio mounts. The crest dipped, and shot up again, in the exact same pattern as before. One short message, twice repeated. Standard radio procedure for sending a message under difficult circumstances. The military called it “words twice”. With his hand shaking, he pressed the button marked print. That would decode the Morse into plain English. Everyone in the room understood Morse except the guards and Franklin, but Boris was too nervous to decode anything right now. He was swaying with disbelief. The printer started rolling and a small sheet of paper came out. What he was about to read was communicable words from an alien race. He took the paper and read it half a second before he began to speak aloud. He managed the first word before the meaning of the message reached his brain.

“Be...”

 He stopped. Panic settled in. He began piecing things together. Why had SETI encountered so many false alarms, and dead ends? Why did it seem that star systems that were capable of supporting life never responded to Earth’s radio signals? How many of the thousands of broadcasts, in every conceivable frequency had actually been received? The answer was in his hand, more terrible than any of them had imagined. Extra-terrestrial life had finally responded.

He wished they hadn’t.

Franklin broke the silence.

“Be!? For fuck’s sake Boris, be what?”

Boris said nothing, he only shook his head and dropped the message. It swayed to the ground like an autumn leaf, resting face up. The print was large enough that everyone in the room could read the six words printed there. Suddenly, they all understood. The cold touch of inescapable dread settled over everyone there. 

The message read;

BE SILENT. IT CAN HEAR YOU.