You are walking to your office on the University of Chicago campus after giving your second and final lecture of the day. It’s nearing the end of May, which is nice, except that means that final exams are coming, which isn’t exactly a treat for the professors either. However, you were recently promoted to Associate Professor, so you are only teaching two classes this year. Your research on interactions between primates and other mammals is coming along nicely, and you wonder if it might be just the right thing to snag a tenured position with the Anthropology department.

When you get to your office, there are two men in suits that seem to be waiting for you, like they do in every action movie where the FBI or CIA or any of those government agencies have to bring in some unsuspecting civilian to make things happen. You smile a little at the thought, and assume they are here for some financial or procedural investigation for the department.

“Dr. Halpert?” one of them says.

“Yes?”

“We’re with the United Nations,” he continues. “We need you to come with us.”

You gape at the two men, who aren’t wearing sunglasses indoors, but they may as well be given the way they can look right into your eyes without actually making eye contact. “You’re kidding,” you say.

“Nope,” the other man says, shaking his head. “We can tell you more information in the car, which is down in the parking lot. Please come with us.”

The way they are looking at you makes you wonder how sincere the please actually is, so you quickly gather some papers from your office and follow the men down to the parking lot. They lead you to an inconspicuous silver hybrid, and they begin driving. Probably to my own house, you think, having seen enough action movies to know how this part of the story goes.

The man sitting in the passenger seat, next to the driver, turns to face you. “A few countries around the world have received what appears to be a signal from an extraterrestrial planet.

“WHAT?!” you exclaim, the seatbelt constricting your physical reaction in a way that is probably good right now.

The man continues calmly, “We’re assembling a team to decrypt the message, and we have no idea how dangerous or advanced the source of the message may be, so we are trying to act quickly. This is going to be worldwide news in a matter of hours, and the UN wants to have as much information as we can for the public.”

“Wait,” you say, suddenly realizing the implications of what the man just said. Your research hasn’t been bad, but there’s no freaking way the UN would have read it, especially seeing as you are practically a nobody in the world of anthropology. “Why did you pick me? There are hundreds of anthropologists who are way more qualified than I am.”

The man sitting next to you in the backseat starts scrolling through his phone. “Dr. Halpert, as I’m sure you know, there aren’t many anthropologists specializing in interspecies communications. We don’t want to bring too many people on board here, and your research indicates that you know linguistics almost as well as anthropology. This paper of yours is what led us to choose you.”

He holds out his phone to you, and you let out a groan when you see the title. “You read my paper on prairie dogs and decided I was the right man for the job?”

“You said it yourself in the paper, Dr. Halpert,” the man in the passenger seat says. “Prairie dogs have one of the most advanced forms of communication, the quote-un-quote dialect varies among colonies, and you’ve had success communicating with them in ways we haven’t seen with water mammals or primates. Those are the types of things we are looking for when choosing someone who can deal with a potential alien lifeform.”

“That’s not even a paper I did with Chicago; that was my dissertation,” you protest.

“Oh, good,” says the man in the backseat. “You’ll be even better now.”

Unsurprisingly, the car does take you to your house, and they let you know that there’s a helicopter at O’Hare ready for you all.

“Can I at least ask where you’re taking me?” you ask.

“New York,” the man in the backseat says. “That’s where the UN always meets. We have a whole team coming over the next few days to try to figure out the message. So, pack what you need, and we’re out of here.”

You let out a quiet sigh and turn into your house. The timing is terrible. You still have two more lectures planned for your classes, plus a review lecture, and you haven’t written the exams for either class. You also feel as though you will be really out of your league when you start working with this team of anthropologists, a rather sinking feeling you thought you would have left behind in grad school.

But at the same time, you are, truly, beyond excited at the thought of getting to translate an alien message. Even if you make zero contributions, you might get to be part of the team that legitimately interacts with extraterrestrial life for the first time in human history. Clinging to that hope, you quickly pack some clothes and everything you will need to finish the academic term, before getting back in the car and driving to the airport.

In the helicopter, you send emails to your teaching assistants and your students, letting them know about the changes to the last couple weeks of term. You’ve decided to let your teaching assistants handle the review lectures, and you’ll be giving your students a proctored multiple choice final exam and a take-home essay. Once you’re in New York, the two men take you to a hotel and leave you in the lobby, where you give your name to the attendant and find there is a room already reserved for you. When you walk in, you see a folder on your desk with a note attached to the front.

This folder contains a photo of the signals and the locations where we received them. Your first meeting is tomorrow at 10:00, and we will send a shuttle to come get you.

You open the folder and pull out a sheet of paper.

 https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51358188094_48e9a3c7ff_n.jpg

There is also a list of locations:

Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii, United States

Benmore Peak Observatory, South Island, New Zealand

Kitami Observatory, Hokkaido, Japan

Lulin Observatory, Mount Lulin, Taiwan

You don’t think it’s a coincidence that the signals were all recorded in observatories along the Pacific, but you don’t have much insight into why that would be the case. You are sure that the UN also has a team of astronomers, or whoever does this kind of thing, working on this as well.

You do think it’s a good sign that four different observatories recorded the same signals, which suggests that these extraterrestrial beings were very intentional about sending these signals to Earth. But as you don’t know anything about these creatures, you can’t deduce much else.

For now, though, you hang up your suit jacket, place an online order for Chinese food, and begin looking for patterns in these mysterious signals from the unknown.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

The next day, you review your notes as you wait outside for this alleged shuttle. The fact that these beings have a language that can at least be adapted to a written form is incredibly promising. The fact that they appear to only have four symbols is less promising, especially since it is very easy to find patterns when there are only a few elements. The human brain likes order, and you can be led astray when you are concentrating on patterns that may not actually exist.

You have been wondering if there is more to the signals than what is on the sheet of paper, more than just these visual symbols. Hopefully you won’t have to wonder for much longer, because a sleek black van pulls up, asks for your name, and lets you in.

The drive is short, considering you’re in New York, and you are directed to a large conference room on the fourth floor of the UN headquarters. You meet the other members of your team, which are a few other anthropologists and a few linguists and a few representatives from the observatories. You all begin chatting about your research and what led you here when a woman walks in and makes her way to the front of the room.

“Alright, everyone. My name is Nera Vivaldi, and I will be overseeing this meeting over the course of, well, however long we’re here. We’ve managed to keep this all under wraps, but CNN and BBC and several other networks around the world plan to release the news of the signal interception over the next several hours. We don’t see any reason to panic yet, since we don’t see any spacecrafts approaching Earth within a large radius, but we have a responsibility to provide the citizens of the world with as much information as we can.

“We have a team working on tracing the origin of these signals, and we have a team preparing a spacecraft for departure as soon as we know the source. As some of you may know, many space agencies around the world have almost perfected time contraction technology, which allows for travel over great distances in outer space. So if we don’t make much progress here, it is very likely we will be sending one or two of you on the journey.”

That grabs your attention. Go to outer space?! Even though you know there’s no way you would be chosen, your mind races with the possibilities of getting to see another planet, another solar system, and, oh my God, getting to interact with an alien species.

“I’m sure you all have a lot of questions, but time is of the essence, and, frankly, I don’t have that many answers, and so I ask that you all start working together now. We’ll be sure to update you with any relevant information we get.” And with that, you all look to each other, realizing, whether for the first or twentieth time, that you are all faced with the single greatest challenge of your careers.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Four days later, you haven’t made any real progress. Everyone on the team seems to be getting the same few ideas over and over, and there’s a heavy air of discouragement in the room. You’ve been wondering exactly what you have to offer because you’re still an anthropologist, not a linguist or an astronomer. Yes, your specialty is interspecies communication, but it would help if there were, you know, other species to communicate with.

Some of the linguists have broken off into their own group as they use the signals to determine the best way for humans to connect with whoever sent this message. This seems like a far more promising task to you, so you join them. You listen to their ideas, which range from sending them the simplest human alphabet in visual and auditory form to see how they handle spoken language, to sending a list of simple nouns and verbs in hopes they can select the ones they included in their message.

“Maybe we should consider how these signals were sent to us,” you finally suggest. “I mean, all we have is this picture, but was there any sound associated with the symbols?”

“We can ask one of the scientists from the observatories,” says the man next to you.

You get up and find the scientist from the New Zealand observatory. “Hi, I’m Jim Halpert, I’m sorry if this was already mentioned, but were there any sounds that came with the signals?”

She smiles and waves her hand in the air as if to dismiss your apology. “Oh, yeah, I don’t think Nera mentioned it, but the observatories all reported the same sound with every signal, including the black spaces. I’m Jennifer, by the way.”

You think for a minute. This is not your field, and you’re worried about saying something wildly inaccurate. But the element of sound seems too important to ignore, so you continue. “And is that, like, factoring in all the sounds coming in right after one another? Like with a fire truck, how the siren sounds different as it moves away from you? Sorry, I don’t know the technical term for it.”

Her eyes widen slightly as though she had not considered this. “I mean… I guess that could be a possibility. I can’t imagine that would be the case considering the pitches all sounded exactly the same, but that’s not out of the question, now that you mention it.” She pulls out her phone. “Let me call my supervisor back home, and I’ll see what she finds.”

You thank her and head back to the group. They’ve moved on to discussing the World Cup, which you figure is probably just as productive until you learn more about the sounds that came with the symbols.

During your lunch break, Jennifer finds you again, just as you’re about to house a turkey club.

“You were right,” she says animatedly. “The individual pitches are different. But here’s the crazy thing. The overall pitch still sounds the exact same. I definitely wouldn’t have noticed anything just from the sound alone.”

“That’s great! Is there a way for them to match the pitches to the symbols?”

“Yes, they’re working on that right now. We need to go tell Nera.”

“I think she’s in her office right now,” you say, standing up and pushing your chair into the table.

When the two of you get to Nera’s office, she is on a video call with Henry Pickens, the head of the twenty-year-old department of extraterrestrial affairs. There’s a projector displaying Henry’s image on the wall in front of you, and it is the perfect intimidation tactic to make you doubt your new insight.

You clear your throat quietly. “Hi, um, we think we have an idea but we can come back later—”

“Oh, gosh, no, please go ahead,” Nera assures you. She sits down at her desk and turns to you and Jennifer expectantly.

“Jim asked me earlier if there was any sound associated with the signals, and I told him that we all recorded the same sound with each symbol, but then he asked if that was factoring in the wave interference. I had my supervisor look into it, and it turns out that the symbols were actually sent at different frequencies,” Jennifer says. “The pitch is still the same, but the individual pitches are slightly different.”

Nera thinks for a minute. “So what does that mean?”

“It means there’s more to their language than just the symbols we’re seeing here,” you say, feeling vindicated that you finally have some evidence to support your suspicion.

“The sounds couldn’t possibly be connected to the symbols though. Not if the pitch sounded the same each time.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” you reply. “Maybe it’s a coincidence that the waves cancelled out in the way that they did and gave us the same pitch.”

“I can’t imagine a civilization advanced enough to send a signal to another planet wouldn’t know about wave interference,” Nera says. “They had to have done this on purpose. They needed the sound to be the same, and so, knowing interference would happen, they sent them at different frequencies.”

“I can’t imagine a civilization this advanced has a written language that is this simple,” you counter. “Four distinct symbols? That can’t be right. The language has to be more complex than that. Maybe not an element of sound. But something else. And frankly, I don’t know if we can figure it out on Earth.”

“Sounds like a volunteer to go to space to me,” Henry says over the video. You immediately begin to protest, but he keeps talking. “You’re an anthropologist, right? And it seems like you know linguistics and physics pretty well, too.” You try to protest again, to say that your idea about the sound waves was just a lucky mistake (because, come on, you didn’t even know the right term), but he’s having none of it. “This is excellent timing, as well. My team has confirmed that the signals came from the third planet from the nearby star Altair. We’ve already picked a couple astronauts to make the trip, and we’re looking into finding someone who knows this part of the galaxy.”

Nera smiles at you and says, “You really do seem like the perfect candidate, Dr. Halpert. I can take you down to the air and space offices now, if you’d like.”

“Just—just like that?” you stammer, feeling somewhat blindsided by the sudden turn of events. “I mean, this would be a while from now, though, right?”

“NASA had actually been planning a mission to this area of the galaxy for the past couple months,” Henry says. “Some research out of Cal Tech indicates an unusual distribution of antimatter, so they had been planning to investigate Altair and some of the neighboring stars, and then when we learned of these signals, we just had to change the course slightly. We could probably be ready to leave within a month, maybe even a couple weeks.”

A couple weeks? Your heart starts racing at the insane opportunity and immense honor presented to you while your brain comes up with about a dozen reasons why you’re the wrong person for the trip. You don’t have any training to go into space, you’re pretty fit for a university professor but you’re not astronaut level fit, and you have no idea where you would even begin to try to communicate with an alien species.

Then again, no one really knows the best way to communicate with aliens. And you were the one who thought to look for the differences in sound waves. Maybe you’re not such a bad pick, you tell yourself.

“Alright, let’s do this,” you say to Nera, sounding far more confident than you actually are. You thank Jennifer again before following Nera down the hall and over to the elevators.

You’ve never felt this amazing and this nervous at the same time.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

The air and space offices are up a few floors from where you’ve been working, and Nera leads you to a waiting room at the end of a hallway. You see a man in a suit standing next to a taller man with glasses and a middle part and a short sleeve button-up in a true mustard color.

The man in the suit looks up from his phone. “Ah! You must be the anthropologist!”

“Hi, yes, I’m Jim Halpert,” you say, extending your hand.

“Mr. Halpert,” the man repeats in a deep voice. “We’ve been expecting you.” You stare at him blankly for a few seconds before he bursts into laughter. “No, no, I’m just kidding! I am not a Bond villain. I am Michael Scott, and this is Dwight Schrute,” he says, gesturing to the taller man. “We are astronauts, first and foremost, but I am also something of a comedian.”

“Yeah, one time he wore a women’s suit to one of our conferences. That was definitely his best performance,” Dwight says.

Michael glares at Dwight before continuing. “Anyway, I’ll be serving as Captain on this mission, so should you have any questions, please direct them to me.”

“You can run things by the department, first,” Nera assures you in a low voice, an amused smile on her face.

You turn to Dwight. “So, what do you do?”

He looks a little surprised at your question but not unhappy to talk. “For the last few years, I have worked as an engineer with the Omicron Project, which was designed to collect various samples from the Kuiper Belt, and on this mission, I’ll be serving as Assistant Captain.”

“Assistant to the captain,” Michael emphasizes. “Which means nothing, really,” he adds under his breath.

“Well, I had to pull Captain Scott and Mr. Schrute out of a meeting to come meet you, so I’ll let them get back to that,” Nera says. She thanks Michael and Dwight and turns back to you. “If you need to take care of some things back home, we can arrange that, but we’d like you back within a few days if you want to go on this mission.”

This is your last chance to back out. Well, back out honorably, anyway. You never imagined doing anything remotely like this, and you’re nervous. You’re nervous that you’re underqualified, you’re nervous for the demands of the mission, and you’re nervous you might not succeed at all. But by God, you have the chance to go to space. And the thrill of that is unnerving, yes, but you suddenly don’t care. “I’ll be here as soon as I can.”

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Back in Chicago, you talk to the department chair at the university and arrange for some time off. He is a little sad to see you go, but he is amazed at the opportunity (and the attention it will bring to the school, of course) and assures you that your position will be available whenever you return.

Next up is your family. You realize there is a very real possibility that you will not make it home, but you don’t say it that explicitly when telling your parents. You just say that it might be dangerous, but it is an amazing opportunity to learn about the universe, and you can’t pass it up. Which is very true. But it doesn’t make things any easier to say a possible final goodbye.

The lease on your apartment is set to end in three months, and you ask your parents to move your things into a storage unit if you aren’t back by then. You pack anything and everything you think you might need: clothes for any physical setting imaginable, a few books related to your work, a few books for leisure, and your computer.

You don’t allow yourself much time as you leave your apartment, figuring that any fear that could result from thinking too much about the future is best left at home. Instead, you take a deep breath, gather your bags, and start making your way to Houston, Texas.

Henry greets you when you arrive at the NASA headquarters, and he tells you that the crew will be having their first meeting in about an hour; you’re just waiting for the cosmologist to arrive. For now, he leaves you in a conference room, where you reunite with Michael and Dwight. Michael is quite happy to see you, which you suppose is understandable given that his company has been, well, Dwight.

You listen to Michael and Dwight argue over who gets to take command of the ship once it has escaped the Earth’s atmosphere, and you’re thinking of finding a temporary means of escape when the door opens and a woman walks in. She’s wearing dark blue jeans and a tan blazer. She has brownish red hair that settles effortlessly around her shoulders, her eyes sparkle as she looks hesitantly at you and Michael and Dwight, and dear God you hope she’s coming on this trip with you because you can’t imagine another part of the universe presenting you with anything as beautiful as she is.

She smiles warmly as she makes eye contact with you. “Dr. Halpert?” she asks.

“Hi, yes, that’s me,” you say quickly, hoping that you weren’t staring at her.

Her smile grows bigger as she says, “Hi, I’m the cosmologist. My name is Pam Beesly.”