Free 01-01-00 by R. J. Pineiro

screaming from the field.
    â€œWe’ll get it later!”
    â€œBut this is expensive hardware! What if it rains?”
    Ishiguro smiled inwardly. How typical of a corporate executive to worry about a thing like that while on the verge of making the discovery of the millennium. “You haul it in then!” he shouted while going inside.
    This morning, during one of her daily Internet excursions, Jackie had discovered that the timing of last night’s signal from the southern constellation Centaur coincided with what appeared to be a worldwide computer freeze event, blamed on a new type of virus. Fortunately for Ishiguro and his team, the virus had not reached their systems in the Andes, not only sparing them from this dangerous event, but also allowing them to capture the incoming signal from outer space. Had their workstations been frozen, like so many other systems across the globe, the radio telescope would have stopped acquiring signals during that portion of time, missing what now seemed to be one of the most important cosmological events of the millennium.
    Scrambling up the observatory’s steps two at a time, he reached the main floor. The lights were off. Jackie and three technicians huddled around a glaring monitor, its pulsating glow forking through the spaces in between their bodies, casting a wan hue inside the large room. The clicking of his shoes broke up the silence, mixing with the humming of dozens of small fans cooling the HP workstations.
    Ishiguro peeked in between two technicians, who politely stepped aside after noticing him. Jackie worked the mouse, clicking her way through layers of menus on one window while another window displayed the signal from yesterday’s event in red and what had to be today’s signal superimposed in blue. Beneath that window, a close-up map of the southern constellation Centaur displayed two X marks, one in red and another almost on top of the first in blue, their overlap shade reminding him of the violet hue of the nebula of Andromeda’s feathery ring.
    â€œThey’re not technically from the exact same origin,” Jackie said, zooming in to the point in space between HR4390A and HR4390B. “But awfully close, about two million miles apart.”
    Ishiguro thought about that for a moment and suddenly opened his engineering notebook, making a few notes. “Hmmm, that’s interesting.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?” asked Jackie.
    Ishiguro closed the notebook. “Let’s assume that the signal originated from a planet circling the smaller of the two stars, HR4390A, roughly five times the size of our Sun. If we also assume that this planet circles the sun at about the same speed as our Earth, sixty thousand miles per hour, that would translate to just under 1.5 million miles in a twenty-four hours pe—”
    â€œWhat’s going on?” asked Kuoshi, struggling inside the room while hauling the ten-inch telescope and the laptop.
    â€œHold on, Kuoshi-san. Anyway, the fact that the signals are two million miles apart should be expected if the transmission is coming from another planet. Can you zoom in as much as possible and clean up the image to see if we can spot the planet?”
    Jackie shook her head. “I tried the strongest setting, but all I get is this.” She clicked the mouse a few times and the image on her screen changed to one of near total darkness, save for a dimmed violet-white haze on the right.
    Ishiguro leaned closer to the screen, trying to make out the round shape of a planet in the vastness of space. He could not.
    â€œThere’s a few more interesting things about this event,” Jackie said, tapping her screen with a pen. “Yesterday’s signal pulsated for twenty seconds. Today’s pulsated for only nineteen.”
    â€œLike a—”
    â€œCountdown?” she said.
    â€œMaybe. It could also just be interstellar noise altering the original transmission.