SETI Arctic Research Program; Station 5.


(I'd like to dedicate this to "John 'Taxes'" (see thread below entitled "Tax Payers" and his enlightening comment that was completely relevant to my story.)


Chapter One: A Day in the Life

SETI: The Search for Extra-terrestrial intelegence. Also known as the UFO-nut club. You would think that group

people willing to go to the Arctic to moniter satallite and radio signals would be crazy, wouldn't you. But Adam Black was not crazy, damn it! Or so he claimed. Adam Black had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit and for tresspassing on government property. He had been doing Arctic research with SETI for three years now. He was the expert.

It was nine AM on a Thursday, and Adam Black was sitting, bored and sarcastic as ever, in a revolving chair,

his legs propped up on the desk, his customary leather coat on, eating a Snickers candy bar. He tapped the keys on the somewhat dated-looking desktop with one hand, pausing the streaming data to review a spike in radio activity about thirty-five minutes earlier. He ran a hand through his thick, greesy black hair, reviewing the information at his leisure.

Samantha McCain, the enthusiatic new recruit, walking in, standing behind him to examine the computer

screen.

"Looks like a radio anomoly," she said. "Possibly caused by incoming signals on an abnormal frequency."

"No," Adam said disinterestedly. "It's just a spike in communication. Probably Station 2 sent out a message to

station 4 or something."

"Well what did they send the message about? Can't you tap into their communications?"

"'Course I can, but I'm not."

"Well why not?"

"Cause if it's important, they'll talk to us too."

"So what do we do now?"

"You watch this little line go across the screen for a couple hours. I'm gonna have a drink." Adam got up and

walked out of the little monitering room and into his bedroom. There was a miniscule bed, barely large enough, a tiny oak desk with a little black swivel stool, and a tiny urinal in the corner. He sat in the stool and, with difficulty, pulled out a desk drawer in which there was a bottle of whiskey, a few papers, and a snub-nose revolver. He removed the whiskey bottle and took a swig, but there was a knock on the door.

"It's 481516, McCain! I'm not gonna tell you again!" he called. "It's me!" Rickie's voice called from the other side

of the door. "Come in, then. It's unlocked." He turned to the door as it opened, bottle still in hand. "Want a drink?" "No, thanks. We got something messing with our northern satallite." "Okay; I'll come take a look at it. Get me Rodriguez, will you?"

Adam climbed up next to the northern satalite, Paulo Rodrigez, a 6ft. 4in. tall Mexican man with messy dark hair, climbed up with him and started fiddling with it, his massive hands miraculously not breaking anything and his usually calm face becoming focused and determined. Samantha came jogging up to the northern the building.

"Adam, we had another radio spike, and now I'm getting jumbled readings from this satallite!" she called with

excitement.

"Something is coming through?" Rodrigez called back to her curiously. "Yes," she yelled back. "It's just static, though. It sounds like just jumbled noises."

They all returned to the building, with the expection of Adam, who went to fetch their other collegue, Mike Proverb, who was in his own small room, his cheap tape player blaring the Kansas album "Point of Know Return" from 1977. Adam knocked on the door. No responce.
He knocked again.

"What the hell are you listening to?" Adam shouted through the door. "Turn it off!"

The music stopped and the door opened. The young man with glasses and long, reddish-brown hair straight out of the '70s looked Adam in the eye.

"It's Kansas, 1977," the young man said. "We've got some static coming through, and we need everybody to take a look at it."

"Turn that **** off and come here; we got some static coming through."

Mike grabbed his Macbook and followed Adam over to the main building where everyone was huddled around Adam's aged desktop.

"It keeps getting weirder," Samantha McCain told him, excited and nervous. "It's a communicationspike, but it registers every way."

"What?" Mike Proverb asked, confused. "It registers as a digital spike, every kind of radio, and it's picking up on almost every frequency we

can access." Mike Proverb, perplexed, pushed his way gently past his friends and into the chair at the desk, sitting at the computer.

"It's a definite anomaly," he said. "The satilites are picking it up multiplle ways, but we're not getting

the whole signal. We're only picking up a part of it. It registers a signal, but we can't quite isolate what it is."

"What does that mean?" Samantha inquired. "It means it's not coming from something we can communicate with," Adam told her. "Or its being

tampered with. Eithe encrypted by the sender or maybe our messed up satillite. . . . Try to get in touch with the other stations and see if they're picking this up." McCain ran off to radio the other stations, and Adam stood behind Mike, looking at the screen, the regular scanners gone now and a series of letters, numbers, and symbols streaming across it as Mike worked his electronic magic.

"I can't figure it out. This computer's so old, and this signal isn't like anything we've seen before. We

need to definitely record all this," Mike Proverb told the others, turning on his laptop and trying to connect to the satillite."