Final Report 2

By Jim Chaffee

First Contact

First contact happened abruptly six weeks ago. The search had been dry prior to that time. All the collected data from past years yielded no positive identifications of code, though on simulated data the software performed exceptionally. The sudden detection affirmed the validity of the software once and for all.

Periodic of length eight hours and a few minutes, the detected code exhibited a variable bit rate between one bit per nanosecond and one bit per millisecond. Several odd and disturbing elements related to the appearance.

First of all, the code repeated not only with binary precision, but with precision in the gray scales that ordinarily are symptomatic artifacts of noise. This marked the event as less likely than a simulation. This is to say, even the noises were perfectly repeated.

Secondly, the code distributed itself over all antenna frames in a random pattern. Worse yet, each frame recorded only one bit of the code per time period. This would seem to indicate that there were multiple sources surrounding the earth, until one stops to consider that the code made unique appearance within antenna frames that overlapped their view of the sky with other antennae which did NOT see the bit.

This last point needs to be understood clearly. A bit appears in a single antenna frame, but not in any of the frames overlapping the sky in its view. This occurred even in those frames where there happened to be total redundancy among several antennae, so any transmission would have been shared by at least one other antenna. Such an eventuality seems impossible and cannot be explained at this time. It is as though the signal could be directed at particular antenna and not be heard by other antennae listening to the same swatch of sky.

Stranger yet, considering the initial bit of the code as odd and the second as even and so on, eventually all even bits repeated a pattern within a pattern, both in gray scales and even in a kind of harmonic entrapment that accorded a rhythmic element within the code as a lattice in grays. Moreover, the code not only exhibited musical qualities but the structure of a Brouwerian lattice (see the appendix).

In the initial phase, then, the software pieced together a code broadcast in a broken bit stream, at a precisely varying bit rate matching exactly the timing of the network, including the timing drifts, and with precision in the gray-scale indicating noise intensity, but repeated exactly over each period. This would seem to have been rigged data, particularly since each bit showed up once per antenna, not detected by any other antenna looking at the same swatch of sky. The natural inclination was to look to some internal malfunction, either in the software or in the network, though it is not clear how the network could produce such an anomaly.

No Anomaly

The search for errors began after the code repeated the third time. We had already pegged this as an error before the third period was completed, and with the third it was declared a software bug. But the fifth cycle of the code appeared within a single antenna. Instead of distributing itself around the network, bit by bit, the entire code appeared only within an antenna near Adak, Alaska. It lasted precisely one period and then redistributed itself bitwise, randomly across antennae, as before. Though not ending the hunt for a software bug, this did prompt the dispatch of a team to Adak to check the antenna.

We dispatched three Air Force personnel from a nearby base to Adak by helicopter. The details of what befell these personnel has been described in an earlier report, so here we only summarize the events for those not familiar with that report.

The antenna was located in an isolated area away from the city. There was no obvious damage to the antenna. We were able to discern the disconnect and reconnect of the antenna in real time, so there was no problem with the link. Other tests indicated no reception problems with the antenna, since it did receive test bits. Nonetheless, after receiving this single one-period burst of the code, this particular antenna was never revisited by the random bit-by-bit distribution of the code around the antenna network. It is important to understand that the code period showed up only at this antenna, even though there were other antennae sharing the sky with it. None of those antennae received any of the bits from this particular burst. And to reiterate, after this burst no bits were ever again recorded by this antenna.

Dancing Fireflies

The personnel did not arrive at the site until late afternoon and they remained for three hours. While the two technicians performed the tests, remaining in contact with technicians at the lab by satellite phone, the pilot made videos of the area. At dusk, he recorded a large group of fireflies in the an area around the antenna of approximately 100 meters, flashing in synchronization. This in itself is not so unusual, synchronous flashing, but the pattern seemed so odd he asked us to have a look at the video. He was able to record no more than thirty minutes before the level of light became too low. But even though relatively dim, we were able to extract the flashes as digital signals, with intensity, and run them through the code software. We were astounded to find that the flashes matched a portion of the code picked up by the antenna, even to the level of gray scale as a function of intensity. One analyst noted that the flashes were in formation, dubbing the phenomena information in formation.

The three personnel developed symptoms of aphasia shortly after visiting the site. In each case, it started with anomic aphasia in which they were unable to find nouns and verbs to express ideas. As this speech degeneration progressed, they were admitted to an Air Force hospital where the staff witnessed their communication skills degenerate before their eyes. They soon lost the ability to use language altogether, neither understanding nor communicating with written or spoken language. They sprouted a rash of unknown etiology, raised tiny dots of varying degrees of red, some lighter some darker. The raised dots fell off shortly after appearance, simultaneously for each patient and simultaneously for all the dots, leaving behind pinpoint glowing scars. Within a day of this, the patients all seemed to blur, fading away. This is the language used in the medical report, that they seemed to blur and fade away, smoothing into the background and eventually disappearing.

This has been kept from the families and the press with some difficulty, since the families have requested the bodies. The Air Force has officially stated the bodies were burned to prevent outbreak of a new unknown and virulent virus.

We digitized the photographs of the rashes covering the three men and ran them through the software. Nothing materialized until we synthesized the photos across rows of dots, with which the software detected a pattern from the larger code sequence. Again, information in formation.

Code Details

The code has been studied by a variety of researchers, though for the most part without details of how it had been acquired. Their findings can be summarized as follows.

The code is a multidimensional version of an Kasami sequence, running in several dimensions with interleaved subsequences. This is surprising, since this code is useful in spread spectrum communication but due to decimation requirements is so difficult to implement in hardware it is seldom seen.

The recurrence displays hyper-rhythmic patterns so convoluted as to defy analysis from our most significant pattern recognition algorithms. Nonetheless, the code can be readily translated into synthesized music by using the gray scale for intensity, the varying step size between bits as duration, and the position in the lattice as tone. Listening to this causes severe anxiety. In one synthesis, the sequences in different dimensions were taken as separate themes, then combined. When played in separate strands the piece is like an inordinately long minimalist work from John Adams or Phillip Glass, but the combined piece is more like a short attack from someone of the serial school. No one has been able to endure the entire combined piece. The most common description is as if it were a serial killer from the serial school, but it is difficult to know what this might mean.

Dancing Crustaceans

The second visit of the entire code sequence came two days after the Alaskan visit, appearing at an antenna located on a remote island in the Pacific, uninhabited by anything except birds, insects, sea turtles, and smaller sea creatures. The island is small, about ten square miles, and totally devoid of fresh water. No personnel were sent, but overflights recorded what appeared to be an invasion of tiny crabs. They moved across the island in waves, forming a pattern in time that we determined to match a subsequence from the code. After this visit by the code, the antenna no longer recorded bits, exactly as had happened with the Alaska antenna.

About a day later, contact with the community on Adak ended. Not abruptly, however, since hints of problems began earlier with complaints about difficulty communicating with people in the city. Phone conversations and radio conversations became bizarre, and the last flight to the airport, a night flight, had to be canceled because the lights seemed to flash erratically. The morning flight could not depart since there was no contact with anyone at the airport. Overflight indicated no sign of life. A team sent to investigate found no traces of human life. Moreover, though the team members wore biohazard suits, they all became aphasiac within a day of the visit, exhibiting the same pattern as suffered by the original trio of technicians. As before, they smoothed into oblivion.

São Paulo

Two days later our consulate in Ção Paulo, Brazil received the entire sequence. Reports of armies of cockroaches dancing the samba, the new manifestation of information in formation, people wandering unable to speak and traffic signals flashing incoherent patterns. The entire area of Jardins effected, a dense, upscale neighborhood including the heart of the business district. The stock market shut down, viral contamination suspected of the computers shitting incoherence and scatting random numbers on all the international feeds. The police sealed off the neighborhood, with great difficulty, since it encompasses a large area, but the infestation spread like a plague of strokes. After a few days it seemed to quiet, with the lights blinking randomly but no cars on the streets and the people dissolving into thin air, as if smoothed into ambient background.

First Response

We disconnected some antennae as test. Immediately after the Adak problem, we pulled the Omaha, Nebraska antenna. Nonetheless, more than three days after, reported incoherence spreading from the area around the antenna site. This despite the fact that the antenna had been unplugged three days before and no code had been recorded in real time with the antenna disabled. A check of data for the previous days found the code recorded on all the back-up copies, the one in our storage and the one in Cheyenne Mountain. This is impossible, since the code was not on these disks when they were originally recorded in real-time.

We made extra copies of all the data and locked the disks in different classified safes. We removed several antennas completely and waited, helpless, while Ohama and Saõ Polua vanished. All antennae were removed or disabled as well as possible was, not with help. Data not on disks prior to disable appeared on all of them, no matter where located, as if the event proceeded. Not seen in real time, data appeared on the disks later and the areas underwent information in formation. Marching across the landscape.

The CDC sent people to investigate these outbreaks, believing them to be some new virus. Of course, all pointless. All Aer Froce information remained secret.

Why Me?

They hired me on the brainstorm of one of the resident geniuses. His insight struck everyone as profound, but in truth it stared them in the face from day one. Total global overlap, total separation. The big ah ha amounted to a realization that the right statistical algorithms could synthesize from the whole conglomerate of antennas a tuned array. Tuned in software, after the fact in data.

A literature search of published papers led to me.

Not a difficult problem, given I’d been working it for a decade after my PhD. Simple as looking for hidden codes. Lots of tricks involved.

Par for the course, getting them to give me analog data proved difficult. They’d spent a lot of time digitizing so as to lose nothing. Or so they thought. Fortunately, these packrats kept every fucking scrap of information. Had stored so much data from the past eleven years it boggled the mind, taking up a whole room filled with small, advanced storage media.

First trick, run the raw stuff into my own neural net,

Anyway,

Trivial stuff.

Then the fun part. Looking for patterns within patterns. Patterns in time and out of time. Motley antenna conglomeration, hodge-podge of apertures, tuned bug eyes, bug songs

multidimensional lattices shaded continuum of gray, dimension for each shade of gray by one dimension for each bug eye chirp output

outputs of a single eye, frames

thing of beauty years of codeless noise blasting in through buggy apertures on the sky except for the little shit we filtered out

One day a code appeared out of the blue. I told my boss and a staff meeting came to order within the hour.

Preliminary, I said. A subtle pattern growing in the combined array. Like a rhythmic background beat, over and over, with small rythy

Music

Our visit a day ago. Listened to all of the combined music, fifteen minutes. As though a calypso prayer marching in formation the information through the lattice of gray shades a quantum logic and Browerian lattice both combined. A painful experience, maddening.

Our resident mathematician discovered that the codes exhibited fascinating properties as finite logics, exhibiting a variety of sublogics within the overall Brouwerian lattice. Report of his remains unFinish.

Visitation

Since our visitation sans antenna quiet. Listen to music of codes, alone and combined. Sounds reverberate inside skull a nil n skinel ll si rhythm tvirial sfutt

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