Did you hear that? It was a brief but distinguished noise blaring over the static. Jenna Montalban adjusted the knobs of the HAM radio and listened again, hoping to make a connection. The night sky was just as vivid and as motionless as it seemed outside. But tonight, it was no longer silent. There. It was a low band frequency, a difficult thing to pick up if you werent setting your radio to the right spectrum. The signal strength was weak yet despite this, Jenna could tell that this sound--whatever it was--was made to cross long distances without the slightest bit of degradation. Her radio speaker blared thrice. Then paused. Four times next. Then paused again. And after an agonising wait for the signals return, the speaker blared a third time, repeating its noise in five beeps. And then the static returned and all was quiet once again. Three, four, and then five. A message of math. How unromantic, Jenna thought. She flipped her microphone on and began to hail into the frequency. CQ. CQ. This is Jenna Montalban transmitting in 14.8 gigahertz. Come back? CQ. CQ. This is Jenna Montalban transmitting in 14.8 gigahertz. Come back? Where are you calling from? There was no way she could trace the signal through the shoddy scrap of equipment her mother had built for her. In cases where she would make contact with someone, she would ask them for their longitude and latitude. Her mother had taught her then and now Jenna wished her mother was not over-clocking at work. CQ. CQ. This is Jenna Montalban... Jenna continued her scripted dialogue of contact and mused that maybe the person on the other end didnt speak English. How far did signal travel anyhow? She looked out into the night sky, imagining that she could see the electrical currents of the Earths Ionosphere deflecting the measly signals of her HAM radio up and down different corners of the Earth. The signal couldnt have possibly come from the other side of the Earth as the signal could not get past the planets horizon without the help of a relay station. CQ. CQ... Jenna stopped and stared at her notes. Three, four, and five. It looked like a riddle. Maybe it was a date. March 4, 2005. But that date had long since past and it was unlikely this was what the message meant. So maybe it was a math problem. Adding up all the numbers, she produced 12. Armed with this, she sent the message out into the void. No response. Somewhere out there, Jenna romanticised, someone put all their time and effort into sending this message. It must have meant the world to them. But what would three numbers mean in the grand scheme of things? Or maybe someone was just pranking her. She went to bed. And just as her eyes were about to fall asleep, she remembered a class she had recently, on the sides of a triangle: cos, sine, tan. Her teacher was very adamant about it, slapping his slide rule on the blackboard. This was before he turned into a giant spider that started coating the class in webs. Her classmates started laughing at her before disappearing. Jenna woke with a start, half gasping for air. She had dreamt something. It was something fundamental about the nature of the universe, something old Pythagoras knew. Quickly, she scribbled down the proper annotations into her notes until she ended with the equation: 3+4=5. Not mathematically correct but she had to think of a triangle. A squared plus B squared equals C squared, she mused. This was a Pythagorean Theorem, something embedded into the very fabric of the cosmos no matter where you stood or what concepts you contrived. It was like Pi, Avogadros Number, the cosmological constant that is the speed of light. This was a deeply mathematical conversation, the lingua franca of the universe. Outside, the sunrise was peeking, showering her face in all sorts of mathematical constants. Jenna returned to her console and began hard-wiring a makeshift telegraph on the the machine. Quickly, she stamped out a sequence of numbers, this time putting out the numbers two, three, and four. This wasnt a perfect sequence, of course as the square root of thirteen was not four precisely but three and a couple of numbers past the decimal. But she couldnt think of another sequence of numbers that followed the Pythagorean Theorem and used whole numbers. The clock now showed 9AM, a triangle now formed in its arms. Jenna was late for school. She doubted her mother would let her skip school to wait for a reply. So without hesitation, without looking back, she left her station and exited into the wild blue yonder.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 09:12:13 +0000