![]() ![]() ![]() Her last memories were of her and her crew discovering the Aurora, a luxury cruise spaceship that had gone missing twenty years previously, during its maiden voyage. A month prior she was discovered aboard an escape pod with a skull fracture and no memory of how she got aboard the pod. The novel follows Claire, a team leader who worked aboard a Verux repair ship servicing communication beacons in the outermost regions of explored space alongside her crewmates Voller, Kane, Lourdes, and Nysus. The words before me answer everything.Print (hardback, paperback), ebook, audiobookĭead Silence is a 2022 science fiction horror novel by American author Stacey Kade, writing under the penname of S.A. E…Īs I finish piecing together the message, my stomach sinks like an anchor. Was it possible? Were they really sending a message to us in our own language? Come to think of it, it’s not that out of the question – we had been transmitting pretty much every language on earth for the last 70 years… I begin to decipher with the first encoding scheme I could think of – ASCII. What great message to another civilization can you possibly send with only 248 bits of information? On a computer, the only files that small would be limited to… Surely this is too small for a meaningful message. The transmission ends, having transmitted 248 bits. My mind races through the possibilities of what this could be. ![]() I knew immediately this wasn’t the same message as before. Though the computers are of course recording it, I start writing them down. ![]() It lasts just under five minutes, with a new bit coming in once per second. A civilization within talking distance? This would revolutionize every field I have ever worked in – astrophysics, astrobiology, astro. This means that life must be at most 20 lightyears away. Then it came to me – this original message was transmitted only 40 years ago. Someone had been listening to us, and wanted us to know they were there. The atomic numbers of the elements that make up life. I didn’t get more than halfway through before my hopes were confirmed. I excitedly started arranging the bits in the original 73 x 23 rectangle. 1679 – that was the exact length of the Arecibo message sent out 40 years ago. I looked over the transmission again, and my heart skipped a beat. But the pulses were so perfectly uniform, and on a frequency that was always so silent they had to come from an artificial source. They just seemed to be a random jumble of noise. The numbers didn’t make any sense at first. I measured 1679 pulses in the one minute that the transmission was active. The signal pulsed on and off very quickly with incredibly uniform amplitudes my initial reaction was that this was some sort of binary transmission. Transcendental harmonics – things like hydrogen’s frequency times pi – don’t appear in nature, so I knew it had to be artificial. The transmission came on every transcendental multiple of hydrogen’s frequency that we were listening to. Thirty-six million civilizations, yet in almost a century of listening, we hadn’t heard a thing. We had been shouting our existence at the top of our lungs to the rest of the universe, wondering if we were alone. For the last 78 years, we had been broadcasting everything about us – our radio, our television, our history, our greatest discoveries – to the rest of the galaxy. That is the expected number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, according to Drake’s famous equation. ![]()
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