“Tyrell told me he heard your track on the radio the other day,” Kendell said.
“He told me.”
“Aren’t you supposed to get money for that?” Kendell asked.
Dante rolled his eyes half-way and gave a slight shrug. “I don’t know. I guess. Like a nickel or a penny a play or something, but I’m not worried about that. If it gets enough plays, I’ll be able to put out the record. Somebody will notice and want to make money off me, just like they noticed Kaylinne.
“The suits in the industry don’t know good music, they know good money. If I look like money to them, well, then I’ll get a shot.”
Kendell’s eyes bugged out for a moment. “Scots, you can’t sell out before you get through the door.”
“FireArm, I’m not selling out,” Dante said. “You gotta get through the door to make any money, that’s just the way it works. You want to make music, you’ve got to make music somebody wants to pay for; you can’t just make it for yourself.”
Dante looked around the store to see if anyone was listening to them. He grabbed Kendell’s arm and leaned toward him.
“You gotta do what you gotta do to get in, but you gotta be true to yourself, too, which is why I’m doing what I’m doing. If that’s ‘selling out’ to you, well, you’re wrong,” Dante said. “But the odd thing about your so-called selling out and making it in the industry is this: the more money you make, the more artistic freedom you get. Ain’t nobody gonna tell you no after a certain point in your career, if you’re successful.”
Kendell nodded. “Well, maybe. I got all the artistic freedom a person could want and less than $500 in my bank accounts.”
Dante smiled. “It’ll come.”
Kendell looked into Dante’s eyes. “You sure?”
Dante let out a little laugh. “Well, yeah, something’s gotta come. Maybe all I’ll ever be is a guy who releases his tracks online for tiny sips from the well, but that’s something. That’s not nothing.”
“It ain’t much, either,” Kendell said.
“True, but it’s something,” Dante said. “If I quit, then that’s nothing. And I ain’t going to quit. ‘Bounced Sound’ is gonna be big, anyway. It’s like nothing nobody has heard before.”
Chapter 36
General Hibbens sat uncomfortably in the chair at the long desk, his notes piled neatly before him, a pitcher of water nearby. He was flanked by Colonels Thibideaux and Taylor, who were also decked out in their Class A uniforms, notes stacked before them, as well. Hibbens and his staff had rehearsed their testimony for days before making the journey to Washington, D.C., as he wanted to ensure all three of them were on the same page on every detail.
The previous three days had consisted of endless briefings with senior officers and government officials, three days Hibbens had found to be exhaustingly excruciating. The entire chain of command was inexplicably over-curious about his findings, and he and his staff had been forced to defend their findings countless times. Nobody, it appeared, wanted to believe.
As expected, however, the Senate Armed Services Committee had eventually become aware of the work his unit had been doing, and Hibbens had been summoned to the District of Columbia to sit before it and explain what he and his unit were up to, which is the reason for the several days of briefings he had just endured. Many of those involved in the briefings now sat behind him, awaiting his testimony. Hibbens secretly thought they thought he’d recant and make this kerfuffle go away, so that nobody would have to worry about dealing with it and he could be sent back to Nevada with an emasculated agenda.
Just then the gavel sounded and the room grew quiet. Hibbens fixed his attention on the chairman and waited patiently. Senator Darnton put the gavel down, looked to his fellow panel members, and turned his attention to Hibbens.
“Thank you, general, for you and your staff coming here today. We’ve all read your report and listened to the material, and I must say, I’m stunned and bewildered at your conclusions,” Darnton said. “Are you absolutely certain that the transmission you intercepted and analyzed is extraterrestrial in origin?”
Hibbens nodded. “Without a doubt, senator. It’s from somewhere outside our system.”
Darnton leaned toward his microphone. “How far out?”
“That’s impossible to determine. As shown in the briefing papers, the signal’s reverse trajectory takes it on a path outside of the solar system to a possible origination from, as noted in the materials, any of nineteen star systems.
“But that’s only if you take it out that far. If it was an intentional broadcast directed specifically to the earth, it could have come from any intermediate source much closer.”
Darnton did the best he could to hide his sarcasm, but failed. “Like from a space ship broadcasting just outside our system?”
Hibbens ignored it. “That’s one possibility, yes.”
Another senator on the panel leaned toward his microphone and spoke. “So, you’re not sure where the signal came from?”
Hibbens looked at the senator. “No, we’re not. But based on the data we’ve been able to gather, it came from outside our system. How far out is an unknown.”
Darnton waved off the other senator and took the microphone. “Now, general, I’m curious about the findings of the broadcast. You’ve broken it down into several distinct portions, and you’re certain that a portion of the broadcast is a language?
Hibbens nodded. “Yes, my linguistics team has managed to isolate the language elements of the broadcast transmission and have even gone so far as to isolate what appear to be words and sentences, and, to a lesser extent, some of the grammar involved.”
Darnton looked up and down the conference table looking for someone to give away the game, and saw nothing.
“But you don’t know what they’re saying?” Darnton asked.
“No,” Hibbens said, “the language bears no resemblance to any of the known languages on our planet, spoken or written.”
Senator Jason Brownlee leaned into his microphone. “So, there’s no way of guessing what the message might be telling us?”
Hibbens wanted to laugh at the question, since he had just answered it, but decorum required he maintain his composure.
“No, senator, none,” Hibbens said. “Unless whoever sent us the signal also sends some decoding elements, we’ll never know.”
“What do you mean by decoding elements?” Brownlee asked.
Hibbens turned to his staff briefly to see if either of them looked eager to explain. Neither did, which didn’t surprise Hibbens. These two colonels still had career options if this business with the signal suddenly blew up in their faces, and their silence here would likely keep them off the radar of those in the chain of command.
“Well, senator, that’d be up to the transmitter to determine,” Hibbens said. “We’re not going to be able to guess what from here, but the speculation is that there would be some sort of universal constants included in the message in a way easily decipherable to the receiver; something along the lines of basic mathematic equations, or a version of the Periodic Table, for example.”
Senator Darnton looked off Brownlee, who reclined back in his chair and fidgeted with a pencil.
“And there’s nothing like that in the signal you intercepted,” Darnton asked, “like in that movie ‘Contact’ from a while back, some sort of signal hiding within the signal.”
Hibbens smiled for a slight second, amused at the movie reference. Hibbens, too, had spent time watching that movie after encountering the signal, and his team had tried to figure out if there was, indeed, a hidden primer in the signal. They had not been successful in finding one. Hibbens wondered if that movie was the sum total of knowledge about extraterrestrial signals that any of the senators had. He figured it likely was.
“Not that we’ve been able to find as of yet, but we’re still looking,” Hibbens said.
“What about the unintelligible portion of the broadcast? Have you made any headwa
y into what that might be?” Darnton asked.
Hell, Hibbens thought, the entire signal is unintelligible to him and his staff, although Hibbens figured the senator was asking about the portions of the signal that his staff figured were not language.
“Nobody on my staff has any idea what that might be,” Hibbens said. “Wild guesses, some of which are in the second addendum to the initial report of the findings, but it’s not the language or a derivation of it. It could be just about anything.”
“It’s not a mathematical primer accompanying the language portion that can be used to translate the language portions?” Senator Brownlee interjected.
Hibbens turned his head and looked at Brownlee. “No.”
“You’re sure about that?” Brownlee asked.
Hibbens sighed inside. He wasn’t sure about anything in the signal. It could be a message of peace and universal love, a warning that the planet should prepare to surrender and be dominated by an arriving space fleet, or the SOS signal of some interstellar vessel that suffered a tragic accident somewhere in the deep recesses of the universe.
“Well, no,” Hibbens said. “If it is a form of describing math, it’s a form totally unfamiliar to anyone we’ve vetted it with, and we’ve had some pretty good mathematicians look at the data. My unit will continue to work on decoding the signal, but right now, all I can tell you is that we don’t know what any of the signal means. We just know we’re listening to authentic signal.
“Whatever this is, it’s from somewhere else in the universe, and they’re intelligent enough to have mastered radio broadcasting.”
Hibbens hadn’t expected the briefing before the committee would last as long as it had, and shortly after stripping off his jacket and tie in the Air Force’s officer’s quarters, he walked over to the desk and screwed off the cap to a bottle of MacAllan and poured a couple of fingers of scotch into a glass. He picked up a cigar and walked out onto the balcony, clipped it and lit it. He took several puffs off of it before taking a sip of the whiskey, and then stared up into the evening sky.
The sky was a rolling spectrum of blues, going from violet to light blue from east to west, and when Hibbens caught sight of the first star to poke through and announce itself, he smiled. Up there, somewhere, was some other version of people.
And, now, someone else in his government would have to figure out how to deal with it; Hibbens had just become a cog in the machine, and that made him happy, as he was no longer the sole person carrying the burden of what to make of the signal.
Chapter 37
Bill Lombard walked into his study with a mug of coffee and sat down at his desk, powered up his computer, and clicked open the latest story he was working on. It came on screen and he started reviewing the last few pages he’d written when he noticed the CD “Bounced Sound” laying on his desk. Carla had brought it to him days ago with the explanation that one of her students had realized that the signal was a fraud perpetrated by a New York City club DJ known as Scots Tape.
But intellectual curiosity got to Bill as he saw it on his desk while working his way through his most recent paragraphs, and he popped it out of its jewel case and slipped it into the CD drive of his computer. He took a deep sip of coffee and closed his eyes when the song started. Thirty seconds later, Bill opened his eyes and stopped the playback.
“That’s the sound we heard last summer that my students thought might be actual signal,” Carla said from behind him. “One of them found out a couple of weeks ago that it was just raw music that was later edited into that.”
Bill swiveled in his chair. “This song was that crap we heard on the Internet?”
“Yeah,” Carla said. “There’s no shortage of crap on the Internet, that’s for sure. Anyway, I’m off to work.”
Carla crossed the room and kissed Bill lightly on the lips. “Have a good day writing.”
Carla left the room and made her way down the stairs, the stairs offering up the occasional creak as proof of her progress down them, and Bill turned back to his computer. He clicked play and turned the volume of the song down, listening to the dance track as he sipped his mug of coffee. As he listened, Bill called up a web search engine and typed “DJ Scots Tape” into and waited for the results. He clicked on a couple of the links and came up with a Web page about Scots Tape by Scots Tape, who happened to be Dante Johnson of Brooklyn, New York City. Bill plugged that information into a different Web search engine and quickly had Dante’s phone number and address. He printed out the page and took a long sip of coffee.
Chapter 38
Dante was sitting at the chair in front of his computers, reworking a song for his “Bounced Sound” album when the phone rang. The phone on the wall, not his cell phone, and nobody but his boss at the store and telemarketers called the phone on the wall. He glanced at it and scowled: he was sure he was off today and he had no desire to deal with a telemarketer or, he hoped, a credit collector. He thought for second and realized he wasn’t behind on anything, and listened as the phone rang several more times.
And then he realized his answering machine was broken and wouldn’t pick up the call, that the phone would ring until the caller hung up.
“Aww, fuck,” Dante said, standing up from his chair and walking to the phone. “Goddamn answering machine piece of crap.”
He picked the phone up off its dock, checked the Caller ID – unknown number – and pressed the accept call button.
“Yeah?” he said into the phone.
“Dante Johnson?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m William Lombard, a writer in Los Angeles, and I heard a song from your ‘Bounced Sound’ disk, it’s called ‘Enter the Ether,’ and I had a couple of questions, if you’ve got a minute,” Bill Lombard said.
Dante was surprised and confused at the same time, but if a writer was calling about a song, that had to be a good thing, he thought, and he softened his tone.
“Who do you write for?” Dante asked.
“Who do-,” Bill said, pausing for a moment. “Oh, I’m a novelist, I write science fiction novels.”
Bill laughed into the phone and Dante wrinkled his brows at the sound.
“What? You haven’t heard of me?” Bill asked.
Dante was confused. “What?”
“Sorry, just kidding,” Bill said. “I mean, I am a science fiction writer and I do publish novels, so I’m not some crank caller, if that’s what you’re wondering. Anyway, I heard your song this morning and I was curious about something.”
Dante scratched his head and wondered what the hell was going on. “Curious? About what?”
“About where it came from,” Bill said. “Specifically, I guess, why you decided to broadcast the beta version of raw data on the Internet.”
Dante stared around his room and wondered if someone was punking him. The guy on the other end of the phone was clearly some square white-collar loser, and whatever he was talking about was nonsense.
“Why’d I do what?” Dante said, trying to find a way to make sense of the conversation.
“I’m just curious, is all,” Bill said, “but the source material you used to create your song, at least as I understand it, comes from a Net broadcast of what I’d call ambient noise, if you get my meaning.”
Dante walked around his apartment listening to the man’s words, wondering what the hell he was talking about and why he, Dante, hadn’t hung the phone up, yet.
Bill stood on his back deck listening to Dante, wondering why the man sounded so confused about his song. Dante seemed like he had no idea about how he had created it, and Bill was wondering if he had gotten the wrong person on the other end of the phone. He took a puff from his cigar and waited for anything from Dante.
“Well, you can download the song from the Web, if that’s what you’re asking,” Dante said.
Bill took the phone from his ear and stared at it incredulously, as if he and Dante were talking about two entirely different thin
gs.
“Ahh, no,” Bill said. “Last summer, you streamed the unedited version of this song over the Internet using falsified ham radio signals routed through a communications satellite that was picked up by various sites that monitor radio frequency transmissions. Well, one site, anyway, a SETI lab here in California.
“I mean, that was you, wasn’t it?”
Dante looked out a window at the street traffic and tried to make sense of what this man was saying to him, and couldn’t.
“Uhh, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dante said, “but I didn’t stream anything on the Net anytime ever, especially not as a fake ham radio signal. I don’t even know what that means, and what the heck’s a SETI lab?”
Bill was now confused, and he took a moment to tap the ash from the tip of his cigar. He heard the sound of the automatic garage door rising and turned his head to see if Carla was home.
“It’s, a, … umm … you didn’t put the unedited version on the Web?” Bill asked. “That’s, uhh, well … how did you get it?”
Dante suddenly realized that Bill Lombard was asking about the music he’d recorded on his ham radio the previous summer, the music he’d used to base his songs for ‘Bounced Sound’ on, and really wondered why some nobody science fiction novelist would be asking questions about it.
“Listen, I recorded it off a ham radio I’ve got hooked to my computer,” Dante said. “I’ve been recording all sorts of stuff that I use as the source material for songs I’m writing. I don’t know where it came from.
“Why, it’s not copyrighted, is it?”
Bill chuckled. “Oh, I highly doubt it. You really recorded it live off a ham radio broadcast?”
Dante shrugged and grew frustrated. “Yeah.”
Bill took a puff on his cigar. “Well, Dante, thanks for talking with me. You’ve just made the story I’m writing that much better. I think.”