There was something wrong with the coffee machine. Sophie shuddered as the dilute, lukewarm liquid slid down her throat. She glanced into her paper cup and set it down on the far side of her desk, intending to dispose of it once she had the willpower to. She leaned back to get some sleep, just for a minute or two. After all, she deserved it: these night shifts were not exactly something pleasant.
Sophie let the soft whir and periodic beeping of the surrounding computers coddle her to a dreamless, shallow sleep.
As she slept, her coffee went cold. More importantly, however, a radio wave at 1420.4 MHz hit the dish of Parkes Observatory Radio telescope. It bounced into the device’s focus cabin, through to the recently upgraded Multi-beam Receiver. Once converted into readable data, it was fed to the observatory’s main computer which spat it out in print.
The computer, of course, had no idea how important the electrical impulses it had just translated into an alphanumerical sequence would be. It didn’t know about the global upheaval they (67UPZPU76) would cause, nor could it understand the wave of excitement that washed over Sophie, still dreary from her nap, as her eyes scanned the printout.
She had often thought about this precise moment, and it was also the main reason she kept volunteering for night shifts: the hope that maybe it would attach her name to mankind’s greatest discovery. Now, as she circled the relevant part of the readout with a red marker, this fame was the last thing on her mind. Instead, she was convinced that this was some kind of bug, an error, a misinterpretation or even a mean-spirited prank by a HAM radio enthusiast. The longer she looked at the ever-lengthening stream of paper, the faster these doubts dissipated.
As history would have it, Sophie Adams ended up as the fourth author of a study discussing the signal. She was responsible for finding that, going by the observed blue shift, its source had to be moving at around 15 km/s. This study, known to the world as Rosenbaum et al. or the Parkes Paper, also found that the signal was frequency modulated, repeating at a constant interval determined to be a base-twelve multiple of the Planck Time Unit. Public reaction was swift and intense: So-called “science popularizers” discussed it on TV and experts wrote Op-eds only to get counter-OP-edded by other experts. Everyone was looking to etch their name into the discovery, driven more by pure jealousy than scientific rigor. Sales of UFO-related merchandise quintupled. Close Encounters of the Third Kind returned to cinemas, and self-titled UFOlogists found themselves thrust into the spotlight of public attention.
A spotlight, which rapidly faded after no additional information about the signal surfaced. It had lasted for around a day, never to return, and all subsequent publications refused to make any concrete conclusions regarding its origin. Perhaps it was bound to fall into the ever-growing pile of scientific oddities where so many other discoveries lay buried.
However, this would not be: The gears of a giant machine had sprung into action even before the first news article on Rosenberg et al. was written.
It was this machine that prevented the release of another paper which described the detection of a myriad of strange infrared signatures crossing the heliosphere just as the Parkes Signal hit earth.
It was this machine that sent grave-looking uniformed figures to the doorstep of Sophie Adams.
It was this machine that directed billions in black-budget funding to projects long dormant or nigh abandoned.
It was this machine that opened diplomatic channels previously thought impassable.
And it was this machine that would give humanity a fighting chance in the years to come.