Chapter Text
February 3rd, 20XX
It has been five days since I started working on the Palo Rojo Large Array in California. And frankly, I completely forgot I brought the journal along. These five days have been filled with onboarding and orientation by both Dr. Ary and Dr. Ríos. Enable storm filters, calibrate polarity, solve equations, track signal waves, etcetera.
I spent yesterday cleaning the solar panels with Dr. Ary, and later he showed me his “signal collection”: all the stuff he found while scanning the night sky in the array. Some of the sounds were beautiful, downright melodious – it’s impressive to know the kind of “music” an ice giant is able to produce. It kind of makes me forget we’re supposed to be searching for intelligent life, which, speaking of: Ary has shown me the “anomalous” signals he’s captured. Apparently in his whole five year stay in the array, these were the only two signals that COULD be positives for indication of intelligent life. Given this output, it’s no wonder the array is funded entirely privately. Eat your heart out, SETI.
The first signal sounded like machines running in the background. Like someone forgot their microphone on. It is just 10 seconds of audio. At first, it was assumed the array had picked up some stray signal from Earth. Ary himself seemed absolutely elated while retelling how after double and triple checking, it was concluded that the signal was beamed in Earth’s direction from somewhere in the Fornax constellation. Captured about three years ago.
The second signal was captured about eight months ago, from somewhere within Cetus. It is heavily distorted static with what seems like moaning in the background. An extremely raspy voice, as if it was struggling to speak and struggling to stay awake. It sounds like no language on Earth, with what seems like extremely loose vowels and almost no consonants. I genuinely felt goosebumps crawl up my skin as I listened to it.
Right now I’m at my station, watching the data captured by the array in real-time. All the satellites are currently pointed at the Libra constellation, you know, where Gliese is. Speaking of the satellites, I’ve taken the time to memorize their names. Every so often either Ary or I have to go to them manually to re-calibrate them. The decay is really slow though, and they’re not synchronized. He told me about five of the satellites need to be calibrated per week. At least re-booting them can be done completely remotely. Anyways, the satellites are:
Argentine, Barbatos, Caldera, Dhinawan, Enyo, Folsom, Gargantua, Higgs, Ingel, Jaya, Kara, Leriac, Marduk, Nian, Orcus, Panthalassa, Quaestor, République, Sahel, Tasik, Usva, Vesta, Weixing, Xhosa, Yona, and Ziegler.
Ary told me these were all named by Dr. Ríos, who I guess is above using the NATO phonetic alphabet.
