Lemuria

Frustrated by the lack of response from Lemuria, Helga sent a variety of more sophisticated signals. These included a 77 cluster string of short and long pulses that, when assembled into an 11 by 7 matrix, would suggest a right triangle. She also sent television broadcasts from Earth and a series of logical cryptograms suggesting mathematical equations. These she tried on all the previous frequencies, plus, a beam of pulsed neutrinos.

The response to her last signal, the neutrino pulse, was immediate.

A pulse of radio, microwave, and optical light mixed with neutrinos, mesons, pions, and an odd disturbance in the local gravitational field rocked the Intrepid the moment the broadcast began.

“Baby, Elvis Christ, where did that come from?” exclaimed Helga as the multimodal input flooded the control room.

The calm female voice of the computer spoke.“The signals originate from a body orbiting the gas giant at a distance of approximately thirty thousand kilometers. It is one of several hundred objects we have tentatively identified as artificial satellites.” Crosshairs zeroed in on a spherical satellite approximately 10 km in diameter, orbiting slowly over the yellow-brown face of the enormous globe below.

“Could you please give me summary statistics, then scan it for all of the usual human modalities and tell me what you make of it?” interjected Marius. The ship’s engineer-cyberneticist was grinning broadly as he eyed monitor. The broadcast had lasted 7.74 seconds, appeared to be analog rather than digital, and was absolutely undecipherable without human assistance. It occupied 23 distinct modalities, it employed both frequency and amplitude modulation on each modality, and the amount of information it contained was unknown.

Helga touched a wall communicator and spoke “Vigo, could you come up to the control room? We have a long stretch of thinking to do here.”