Prompt – The number you reached was wrong, the person you reached wasn’t.
Sam the astrophysicist obsessed with finding alien life climbed Mauna Kea every morning before sunrise. Five miles of black rock and thin air. At the summit at 14000ft, he aimed his laser at the empty stretch of sky between Betelgeuse and the Orion Nebula. He sent the same message he had sent for twenty-five years.
01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110010 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01111000 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110000 01100101 01100001 01101011
Just coded two plain English words. Anyone there?
It was foolish, and he knew it. An alien would need a receiver. It would need to decode numbers – binary. It would need to understand English. The odds were beyond counting. Still, the search had swallowed his life. His wife of twenty-five years finally left. His daughter was away at college, a young woman he had never bothered to know. Lately, staring into that void, Sam felt just as empty.
On this November morning, his hope was at its lowest. To pass the time, he scanned the horizon with his binoculars. Across the channel, Mt. Haleakala rose to the same height as his own peak Mauna Kea. For weeks he had noticed red lights blinking at Haleakala.
Always at the same hour. Tourists, he figured. Kids doing shenanigans.
Then the receiver beeped. Sam froze.
Twenty-five years of silence, and now this. Martians? Jupiterians? Andromedans? The Guardians of the Galaxy, perhaps?
His hands shook as numbers crawled across the screen.
68 65 72 65 20 64 61 64 20 72 69 67 68 74 20 6e 65 78 74 20 74 6f 20 79 6f 75
Wrong. All wrong. This wasn’t binary. There were letters in it, and numbers far past one. His heart sank. Then he stopped and stared. Hexadecimal!
He spent the next several days at his kitchen table with a pen and a conversion chart. Every hour, the message came again. Every hour, he checked his notes against the sky. The timing nagged at him. The beep matched the blinking red lights on Haleakala. Exactly.
Whoever sent this was not in deep space. They were here on Earth! They were close!
But who would even know how to reach him? On the fourth night he finished the last line. He read it once. Then he read it again. Here dad right next to you
The pen slipped from his fingers. Sam picked up his phone and, for the first time in years, called his daughter.
Thumbnail courtesy – Google Images
