Science Fiction Microstory Contest discussion
Thanks to all who voted for my story and those that have participated over the years
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Jot wrote: "Thanks guys. Tom, another close one, as you consistently write great stories for this contest. I am honored by all your efforts and work. Hoping this best of contest this month brings back some of ..."Thank you, Jot, and for all your efforts.
Been out for a while, but congratulations Jot! Great Story! :)
©2018 by Jot Russell
Hori eyed the clock, wishing his shift would end so he could see his friends at the holiday party. It had been a slow week within the deep underground neutrino detection chamber. There were no detections, no new science, just him with a black eye into the cosmos. Nothing even to log before the machine kicked into its weekly maintenance mode at 8pm.
“Screw this, I’m out of here,” he said.
He got up, grabbed his jacket, and flicked off the lights. As he turned to gain one last look at the monitor, he saw a subtle pattern in the darkness, one too faint for him to see when the lights were on.
“What the?”
As his eyes adjusted, he saw a continual wave of movement across the screen with barely enough light for the monitor to even display it. Not your typical burst of a supernovae some million of light-years away, which would certainly have triggered the detection of a large number of distinct neutrinos. This was something else.
He logged into the control station to read the data being recorded...nothing.
“Must be browning of the monitor itself,” he thought.
With a suspicious look, he tapped on the keys to adjust the calibration to maximum. The machine began to register noise within the system, at least that’s what he first believed it to be.
“Wait, there’s a pattern here. Holy shit, Merry Christmas Hori!”
The clock reached eight and he pulled in his chair, forgetting his friends at the party. After a few hours of working the numbers in the darkness, and the time well past that of his shift, he found what seemed to be a primer.
“Oh my God, it’s a signal!”
There were different pages of data, with every sixteenth being a reoccurence. He focused his effort on that frame, while allowing the system to work on its part of recording the rest. Within the numbers, were but more numbers. It was as if there was some type of circular logic that was linking parent to child and child to parent. But within the twisted mess of mathematics, were some “words” that had no linkage back to any other. He wrote each on his note pad when he realized, the number of them matched that to frames before reoccurence: sixteen.
He stared at the page using only the light from his computer control monitor, when suddenly a bright burst came in from the neutrino display monitor and flooded light into the room like a bolt of lightning outside a dark, windowed house. The remnants of an exploded star a million light-years away had overloaded the system and caused the calibration to reset.
Hori squinted and cursed, “Freaking novae.”
After the neutrino burst subsided, he punched again into the control computer and forced the calibration back to full. It took him a few moments to let his eyes adjust, but even after they did, the image returned was as blank as the disappointed expression on his face. “No.”
He punched into the database to review the data recorded, but the program only responded, “Database is in maintenance mode.” Hori had forgotten to override the maintenance cycle as requested in his duty instructions for when an event was being recorded. Aside from the sixteen hieroglyphs on his note pad, the data was lost. He spent the rest of his career trying believe it more than just a dream.
A million years before, an alien race on a distant planet in a dying solar system sent out a message full of the wealth of their years and knowledge until it was suddenly silenced by the explosion of their star.