On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 214, of 240 so far.

Handshake

Bailie ran the analysis again, for the fourth time overall, going even more slowly and triple-checking everything. The results were the same.

He took the tablet with the data, carrying it back out of the room he’d entered several hours ago with the same device in his hand, when the sun hadn’t yet risen above the horizon. It was full daylight now, with the morning well underway, but Bailie was barely aware of the time.

It took only a minute to reach the conference room, and before stepping inside he gestured to the principal scientist of the group of interdisciplinary specialists who reported to him. The woman, whose name was Lev, quickly assembled seven others, and they all joined Bailie in the partially glass-walled room which sat in the dead centre of that floor of the facility.

At the touch of a button, all of the glass panels became opaque, and with the change came a palpable tension which was only exacerbated by several minutes of silence as Bailie silently interacted with the tablet device which now sat on the table in front of him.

“Thanks for waiting,” he said at last, not looking up. A mug of coffee had appeared beside him, and he genuinely had no idea who had brought it. Probably Lev. Not important right now, anyway.

“As some of you already know, we had a data package in the middle of the night last night,” he continued. “The report and the alert were automated, so it’s just ours for now. I’ve been working with it since oh-four-hundred. So I’m grateful for the coffee.”

There were smiles, but none of them were very wide. Everyone was attuned to the tone in the room, and to the tightness in Bailie’s face. Sure enough, the smiles faded as quickly as they’d appeared when he tapped a control on the tablet to mirror its screen on the projected display which occupied most of the side wall.

Chairs swivelled, eyes scanned back and forth, and brows creased. Nobody panicked yet, but that was mostly because the information on the screen was the raw form of the received package; a mess of encoded alphanumerics that was meaningless to anything but a machine.

Bailie tapped another control, and the gibberish was replaced with a stylised diagram showing interconnected geometrical shapes, with single or double lines running between them. Everyone present recognised it as a graphical notation for the structure of a computer program. From further up the large conference table, there was the sound of a palm hitting the table.

It was Desotto, and Bailie raised a hand to forestall the man’s inevitable question. “Yes, that’s what came in,” Bailie said. “Yes, we’re sure. It’s from about thirty LY out, in the approximate direction of Lyra.”

There was silence, each face telling a slightly different story. Excitement. Awe. Fear. Even a small measure of disbelief, but it was momentary, and because of the situation rather than the conclusion. Everyone trusted Bailie completely, both his personal integrity and his professional diligence. That the transmission was genuine, they had no doubt.

“So we’re not alone,” Lev said, mostly to herself, and Bailie tilted his head to one side in a gesture that seemed incongruous with the sentiment.

“We’re not alone,” he confirmed, his voice heavy with the import of the statement, “but there’s a bit more to it than that.”

He interacted with the tablet for almost half a minute, and finally the large projected display changed, this time showing a detailed transmission log from the receiving satellite monitoring station, the information arranged in a dense table with dozens of columns in very small text.

“This is what I’ve been working with all morning,” Bailie said. “You can see what it is. What you can’t really see is that there’s a very significant anomaly with the transmitted data.”

He lapsed into silence again, and one by one the other seven heads turned to consider the large display again, eyes squinting. Desotto even got up and walked over to the whitewashed wall, standing off to one side so not to obscure the projection, with one forefinger tapping his chin as he looked back and forth, up and down. Desotto had never obeyed the conventions of professional dress code, but his brilliance made him invulnerable to any petty sanction. Today he was in yet another of his zeitgeist-pricking t-shirts, along with a ratty pair of jeans. Bailie could see the moment that the younger man understood.

“These stamps; they’re accurate?” Desotto asked. “Not timezone shifted or anything?”

“Accurate and normalised,” Bailie replied.

“That is weird,” the other man said. “Even given the ambient weirdness of getting our first message from a non-human intelligence, I mean.”

“What he’s noticed is that the timestamps on the packets are not only spaced out more than they have any right to be,” Bailie continued, speaking to everyone again, “but they’re also not separated by the same interval, taking everything else into account. Almost, but not quite.”

Lev was looking at him as he finally took a sip of the coffee, and in that moment he knew it had indeed been her who made it for him. He swallowed it appreciatively before speaking again.

“My conclusion — and the computer’s, incidentally — is that the transmission, including the embedded program, was entered manually, bit by bit,” he said. “And we’ve also determined its purpose: it’s a handshake.”

“In the computer networking sense?” Lev asked, and Bailie nodded.

“It also contains a fantastic exploit that causes it to auto-run, so it’s already been executed. It’s like a prompt, specifying in a general way that a reply should be constructed. All it does is send an ACK — or their equivalent — back to its source. Naturally, the LLMs running on the computers on the satellite did that within a few microseconds.”

Silence again. Desotto stayed where he was, near the wall. “So now they know we’re here,” he said, and Bailie nodded.

“Or they will when the acknowledgement signal actually reaches them. More significantly, they’ll also know we have computers,” he replied. “And I’m struggling to think of more than one reason why an obviously sophisticated scientific culture would painstakingly tap out a complex program with their tentacles or pincers or whatever, designed to pinpoint civilisations who have developed computer-automated systems.”

Desotto met his eyes, and then lowered his head to look down at his own t-shirt. Bailie nodded as they both read the characters there, printed in a stark and blocky typeface.

#SayNoToAI it said.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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