Transmission

Maybe she caught something in his expression, because she fell silent for a few seconds. There was something fragile about that silence, as if both of them were tiptoeing to avoid breaking it. Even so, they had to. They couldn’t just walk like this forever.

“Something bad then?” she said, sending the can into a trash container with a final flick of her foot.

Kevin nodded. Bad was one word for it.

“How bad?”

“Bad,” he said. “The reservoir?”

The reservoir was the place they both went when they wanted to sit down and talk about things. They’d talked about Billy Hames liking Luna when they were nine, and about Kevin’s cat, Tiger, dying when they were ten. None of it seemed like a good preparation for this. He wasn’t a cat.

They made their way down to the edge of the water, looking out at the trees on the far side, the people with their canoes and their paddle boats on the reservoir. Compared to some of the places they went, this was nice. People assumed Kevin was the kid from the wrong side of town leading Luna astray, but she was the one with the knack for squeezing past fences and clambering up derelict buildings, leaving Kevin to follow if he could. Here, there was none of that, just the water and the trees.

“What is it?” Luna asked. She kicked off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. Kevin didn’t feel like doing the same. Right then, he wanted to run, to hide. Anything to keep from telling her the truth. It felt as though, the longer he could keep from telling Luna, the longer it wasn’t really real.

“Kevin?” Luna said. “You’re worrying me now. Look, if you don’t tell me what it is, then I’m going to call your mom and find out that way.”

“No, don’t do that,” Kevin said quickly. “I’m not sure… Mom isn’t handling this well.”

Luna was looking more worried by the moment. “What’s wrong? Is she sick? Are you sick?”

Kevin nodded at the last one. “I’m sick,” he said. He put his hand on Luna’s shoulder. “I have something called leukodystrophy. I’m dying, Luna.”

He knew he’d said it too quickly. Something like that, there should be a whole big explanation, a proper build-up, but honestly, that was the part of it that mattered.

She stared at him, shaking her head in obvious disbelief. “No, you can’t be, that’s…”

She hugged him then, tight enough that Kevin could barely breathe.

“Tell me it’s a joke. Tell me it’s not real.”

“I wish it weren’t,” Kevin said. He wished that more than anything right then.

Luna pulled back, and Kevin could see her screwing her features tight with the effort of not crying. Normally, Luna was good at not crying about things. Now, though, he could see it taking everything she had.

“This… how long?” she asked.

“They said maybe six months,” Kevin said.

“And that was days ago, so it’s less now,” Luna shot back. “And you’ve been having to cope with it on your own, and…” She faded into silence as the sheer enormity of it obviously hit her.

Kevin could see her looking out at the people on the reservoir, watching them with their small boats and their quick forays into the water. They seemed so happy there. She stared at them as if they were the part she couldn’t believe, not the illness.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “All these people, just going on as if the world is the same, going about having fun when you’re dying.”

Kevin smiled sadly. “What are we supposed to do? Tell them all to stop having fun?”

He realized the danger in saying that slightly too late as Luna leapt to her feet, cupped her hands to her mouth, and yelled at the top of her voice.

“Hey, all of you, you have to stop! My friend is dying, and I demand that you stop having fun at once!”

A couple of people looked around, but no one stopped. Kevin suspected that hadn’t been the point. Luna stood there for several seconds, and this time, he was the one to hug her, holding her while she cried. That was enough of a rarity that the sheer shock value of it held Kevin there. Luna shouting at people, behaving in ways that they would never expect from someone like her, was normal. Luna breaking down wasn’t.

“Feel better?” he asked after a while.

She shook her head. “Not really. What about you?”

“Well, it’s nice to know that there’s someone who would try to stop the world for me,” he said. “You know the worst part?”

Luna managed another smile. “Not being able to spell what’s killing you?”

Kevin could only return that smile. Trust Luna to know that he needed her to be her usual self, making fun of him.

“I can, I practiced. The worst part is that all this means no one believes me when I tell them that I’ve been seeing things. They think it’s all just the illness.”

Luna cocked her head to one side. “What kind of things?”

Kevin explained to her about the strange landscapes he’d been seeing, the fire wiping it clean, the sensation of a countdown.

“That…” Luna began when he was finished. She didn’t seem to know how to end though.

“I know, it’s crazy, I’m crazy,” Kevin said. Even Luna didn’t believe him.

“You didn’t let me finish,” Luna said, drawing in a breath. “That… is so cool.”

“Cool?” Kevin repeated. It hadn’t been the response he expected, even from her. “Everyone else thinks I’m going crazy, or my brain is melting, or something.”

“Everyone else is stupid,” Luna declared, although, to be fair, that seemed to be her default setting for life. To her, everyone was stupid until proven otherwise.

“So you believe me?” Kevin said. Even he wasn’t completely sure anymore, after everything people had said to him.

Luna held onto his shoulders, looking him squarely in the eyes. With another girl, Kevin might have thought she was about to kiss him. Not with Luna, though.

“If you tell me that these visions are real, then they’re real. I believe you. And being able to see alien worlds is definitely cool.”

Kevin’s eyes widened a little at that. “What makes you think that it’s an alien world?”

Luna stepped back with a shrug. “What else is it going to be?”

When she asked that, Kevin got the feeling that she was every bit as stunned by all this as he was. She just did a better job of hiding it.

“Maybe…” she guessed, “…maybe all this has changed your brain, so that it has a direct line to this alien place?”

If Luna ever acquired a superpower, it would probably be the ability to leap tall conclusions in a single bound. Kevin liked that about her, especially when it meant that she was the one person who might believe him, but even so, it felt like a lot to decide, so quickly.

“You know how crazy that sounds, right?” he said.

“No crazier than the idea that the world is just going to snatch my friend away for no good reason,” Luna shot back, her fists clenched in a way that suggested she would happily fight it over the issue. Or maybe just clenched with the effort of not crying again. Luna tended to get angry, or make jokes, or do crazy things rather than be upset. Right then, Kevin couldn’t blame her.

He watched her coming down from whatever nearly crying space she was in, winding down from it piece by piece and forcing a smile into the space instead.

“So, terrible disease, cool visions of alien worlds… is there anything else you aren’t telling me?”

“Just the numbers,” Kevin said.

Luna looked at him with obvious annoyance. “You get that you weren’t supposed to say yes there?”

“I wanted to tell you everything,” Kevin said, although he guessed it was probably a bit late now. “Sorry.”

“Okay,” Luna said. Again, Kevin had the sense of her working to process it all. “Numbers?”

“I see them too,” Kevin said. He repeated them from memory. “23h 06m 29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59.”

“Okay,” Luna said. She pursed her lips. “I wonder what they mean.”

That they might not mean anything seemed not to occur to her. Kevin loved that about her.

She had her phone out. “It’s not right for a license plate, and it would be weird for a password. What else?”

Kevin hadn’t thought about it, at least not with the kind of directness that Luna seemed to be applying to the problem.

“Maybe like an item number, a serial number?” Kevin suggested.

“But there are hours and minutes there,” Luna said. She seemed utterly caught up in the problem of what it might mean. “What else?”

“Maybe like a delivery time and a location?” Kevin suggested. “Those second parts sound like they might be coordinates.”

“It’s not quite right for a map reference,” Luna said. “Maybe if I just Google it… oh, cool.”

“What?” Kevin asked. One look at Luna’s face said that they’d hit the jackpot.

“When you type that string of numbers into a search engine, you only get results about one thing,” Luna said. She made it sound so certain like that. She turned her phone to show him, the pages set out in a neat row. “The Trappist 1 star system.”

Kevin could feel his excitement building. More than that, he could feel his hope building. Hope that this might really mean something, and that it wasn’t just his illness, no matter what anyone said. Hope that it might actually be real.

“Why would I see those numbers, though?” he asked.

“Maybe because the Trappist system is supposed to be one of the ones that have a chance of harboring life?” Luna said. “From what it says here, there are several planets there in what we think is a habitable zone.”

She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The idea of planets that might have life seemed like too much to be a coincidence when Kevin had seen that life. Or seen some strange life, at least.

“You need to talk to someone about this,” Luna declared. “You’re… like, the first proof of extraterrestrial contact, or something. Who were those people looking for aliens, the scientists? I saw a thing about them on TV.”

“SETI?” Kevin said.

“Those are the ones,” Luna said. “Aren’t they based in San Francisco, or San Jose, or something?”

Kevin hadn’t known that, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea tugged at him.

“You have to go, Kevin,” Luna said. “You have to at least talk to them.”

***

“No,” his mother said, setting her coffee down so firmly it spilled. “No, Kevin, absolutely not!”

“But Mom—”

“I’m not driving you to San Francisco so that you can bother a bunch of nutjobs,” his mother said.

Kevin held out his phone, showing the information about SETI on it. “They aren’t crazy,” he said. “They’re scientists.”

“Scientists can be crazy too,” his mother said. “And this whole idea… Kevin, can’t you just accept that you’re seeing things that aren’t there?”

That was the problem; it would be all too easy to accept it. It would be easy to tell himself that this wasn’t real, but there was something nagging away at the back of his brain that said it would be a really bad idea if he did. The countdown was still going, and Kevin suspected that he needed to talk to someone who would believe him before it reached its end.

“Mom, the numbers I told you I was seeing… they turned out to be the location for a star system.”

“There are so many stars out there that I’m sure any random string of numbers would connect to one of them,” his mother said. “It would be the same as the mass of the star or… or, I don’t know enough about stars to know what else, but it would be something.”

“I don’t mean that,” Kevin said. “I mean it was exactly the same. Luna put the numbers in and the Trappist 1 system was the first thing to come out. The only thing to come out.”

“I should have known that Luna would be involved,” his mother said with a sigh. “I love that girl, but she has too much imagination for her own good.”

“Please, Mom,” Kevin said. “This is real.”

His mother reached out to put her hands on his shoulders. When had she started having to reach up to do that? “It’s not, Kevin. Dr. Yalestrom said that you were having trouble accepting all this. You have to understand what’s going on, and I have to help you to accept it.”

“I know I’m dying, Mom,” Kevin said. He shouldn’t have put it like that, because he could see the tears rising in his mother’s eyes.

“Do you? Because this—”

“I’ll find a way to get there,” Kevin promised. “I’ll take a bus if I have to. I’ll take a train into the city and walk. I have to at least talk to them.”

“And get laughed at?” His mother pulled away, not looking at him. “You know that’s what will happen, right, Kevin? I’m trying to protect you.”

“I know you are,” Kevin said. “And I know that they’ll probably laugh at me, but I have to at least try, Mom. I have the feeling that this is really important.”

He wanted to say more, but he wasn’t sure that more would help right then. His mother was quiet in the way that said she was thinking, and right then, that was the best that Kevin could hope for. She kept thinking, her hand drumming on the kitchen counter, marking time as she made up her mind.

Kevin heard his mother’s sigh.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll do it. I’ll take you, but only because I suspect that, if I don’t, I’ll be getting a call from the police to tell me that my son has collapsed on a bus somewhere.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Kevin said, moving forward to hug her.

He knew she didn’t really believe him, but in a way, that made the show of love even more impressive.

CHAPTER FIVE

It took around an hour to drive from Walnut Creek down to the SETI Institute in Mountain View, but to Kevin, it felt like a lifetime. It wasn’t just that traffic into the city crawled its way through road closures; every moment was something wasted when he could be there, could be finding out what was going on with him. They would know, he was certain of it.

“Try not to get too excited,” his mother warned him, for what seemed like the twentieth time. Kevin knew she was just trying to protect him, but even so, he didn’t want his excitement dampened. He was sure that this would be the place where he found out what was going on. They were scientists who studied aliens. Surely they would know everything?

When they got there, though, the institute wasn’t what he was expecting. 189 Bernardo Avenue looked more like an art gallery or a part of a university than the kind of ultra-high-tech buildings Kevin’s imagination had conjured up. He’d been expecting buildings that looked as though they might be from outer space, but instead, they looked a little like expensive versions of the kind of buildings his school had.

They drove up and parked in front of the buildings. Kevin took a breath. This was it. They walked into a lobby, where a woman smiled over at them, managing to turn that into a question even before she spoke.

“Hello, are you sure that you’re in the right place?”

“I need to talk to someone about alien signals,” Kevin said, before his mother could try to explain.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We don’t really have public tours.”

Kevin shook his head. He knew he needed to get her to understand. “I’m not here for a tour,” he said. “I think… I think I’m receiving some kind of alien signal.”

The woman didn’t look at him with the kind of shock and disbelief that most other people might have, or even with the surprise his mother had at him coming out with it like that. This was more a look of resignation, as if she had to put up with this kind of thing more often than she would like.

“I see,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to talk to people who walk in off the street. If you want to send a message to us through our contact email, we’d be happy to consider it, but for the moment…”

“Come on, Kevin,” his mother said. “We tried.”

To his own surprise as much as anyone’s. Kevin shook his head. “No, I’m not going.”

“Kevin, you have to,” his mother said.

Kevin sat down, right there in the middle of the lobby. The carpet wasn’t very comfortable, but he didn’t care. “I’m not going anywhere until I speak to someone about this.”

“Wait, you can’t do that,” the receptionist said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Kevin said.

“Kevin…” his mother began.

Kevin shook his head. He knew it was childish, but the way he saw it, he was thirteen, and he was allowed. Besides, this was important. If he walked out and left now, this was over. He couldn’t let it be over.

“Get up, or I’ll have to call security,” the receptionist said. She walked to him and took hold of Kevin’s arm in a firm grip.

Instantly, Kevin’s mother switched her attention from him to the receptionist, her eyes narrowing.

“Take your hands off my son, right now.”

“Then make your son get up and leave before I have to get the police involved.” The receptionist let go anyway, although that might have had something to do with the look his mother gave her. Kevin had the feeling that, now that there was one way she could protect her son, his mother was going to do it, whatever it took.

“Don’t you threaten us with the police. Kevin isn’t doing anyone any harm.”

“You think we don’t get crazies here on a regular basis?”

“Kevin is not crazy!” his mother shouted, at a volume she normally reserved for when Kevin had done something really wrong.

The next couple of minutes featured more arguing than Kevin was happy with. His mother shouted at him to get up. The receptionist shouted that she would call security. They shouted at each other, as Kevin’s mother decided that she didn’t want anyone threatening her son with security, and the woman seemed to assume that his mother would be able to move Kevin. Kevin sat through it all with surprising serenity.

It lulled him down, and in those depths, he saw something…

The cold darkness of space stood around him, stars flickering, with the Earth looking so different from above that it almost took Kevin’s breath away. There was a silvery object floating there in space, just one of so many others hanging in orbit. The words Pioneer 11 were stenciled on the side…

Then he was lying on the SETI Institute’s floor, his mother helping him up, along with the receptionist.

“Is he okay?” the receptionist asked. “Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

“No, I’m fine,” Kevin insisted.

His mother shook her head. “We know what’s wrong. My son is dying. All of this… I thought it would help him to come to terms with the fact that what he was seeing wasn’t real, that it was the illness.”

Put like that, it felt like a betrayal, as if Kevin’s mother had been planning for his dreams to be crushed all along.

“I understand,” the receptionist said. “Okay, let’s get you up, Kevin. Can I get you both anything?”

“I just want to talk to someone,” Kevin said.

The receptionist bit her lip, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

Just like that, her whole attitude seemed to have changed.

“Wait here. Take a seat. I’ll go and see if there’s anyone around who can at least talk to you, maybe show you around. Although there really isn’t much to see.”

Kevin sat down with his mother. He wanted to tell her about everything he’d just seen, but he could see from her face that it would only hurt her. He waited in silence instead.

Finally, a woman came out. She was in her early fifties, dressed in a dark suit that suggested she had the kind of meetings where more casual clothes wouldn’t work. There was something about her that said she was an academic—maybe something in the curiosity with which she looked at Kevin. She offered his mother her hand, and then Kevin.

“Hello, Kevin,” she said. “I’m Dr. Elise Levin. I’m the director here at the institute.”

“You’re in charge?” Kevin asked, hope rising in him. “Of all the alien stuff?”

She smiled with amusement. “I think that’s putting it a bit strongly. A lot of the search for extraterrestrial life happens elsewhere. NASA provides data, some universities get involved, and we often borrow time on other people’s telescopes where we can. But yes, I’m in charge of this institute and the things that go on here.”

“Then I need to tell you,” Kevin said. He was speaking quicker than he wanted to, trying to get the words out before this adult had time to disbelieve him. “There’s something happening. I know how strange it sounds, but I’ve been seeing things, there’s a kind of countdown…”

How could he explain the countdown? It wasn’t like numbers, there wasn’t an obvious point he could say marked its end. There was just a faint pulse that came with the signal in his brain, getting steadily, almost imperceptibly faster as it worked its way toward something that Kevin couldn’t guess at.

“Why don’t you tell me about it while we take a look around?” Dr. Levin suggested. “I’ll show you some of what we do here.”

She led Kevin and his mother through the institute’s corridors, and to be honest, Kevin had thought that it would be more exciting. He’d thought it would look less like an office block.

“I thought there would be big telescopes here, or labs full of equipment for testing things from space,” Kevin said.

Dr. Levin shrugged. “We have some laboratories, and we do test materials occasionally, but we don’t have any telescopes. We are working with Berkeley to build a dedicated radio telescope array though.”

“Then how do you look for aliens?” Kevin’s mother said. It seemed that she was as surprised by the lack of giant telescopes and listening equipment as Kevin was.

“We work with other people,” Dr. Levin said. “We ask for, or hire, time on telescopes and sensor arrays. We work with data from NASA. We put in suggestions to them about places they might want to look, or kinds of data they might want to try to gather. I’m sorry, I know it isn’t as exciting as people sometimes think. Here, come with me.”

She led the way to an office that at least looked a bit more interesting than some of the other spaces. It held a couple of computers, a lot of posters relating to the solar system, a few magazines that had mentioned SETI’s work, and some furniture that looked as though it had been especially designed to be ergonomic, stylish, and about as comfortable as a brick.

“Let me show you some of the things we’ve been working on,” Dr. Levin said, calling up images of large telescope arrays in the process of being built. “We’re looking at developing radio telescope arrays that might be powerful enough to pick up ambient radio frequencies rather than just waiting for someone to target us with a signal.”

“But I think someone is signaling to us,” Kevin said. He needed to get her to understand.

Dr. Levin paused. “I was going to ask if you’re referring to the theory that what some people think are high-frequency radio bursts from a pulsar might be intelligible signals, but you’re not, are you?”

“I’ve been seeing things,” Kevin said. He tried to explain about the visions. He told her about the landscape he’d seen, and about the countdown.

“I see,” Dr. Levin said. “But I have to ask something, Kevin. You understand that SETI is about exploring this issue with science, seeking real proof? It’s the only way that we can do this and know that anything we find is real. So, I have to ask you, Kevin, how do you know what you’re seeing is real?”

Kevin had already managed to answer that with Luna. “I saw some numbers. When I looked them up, it turned out that they were the location for something called the Trappist 1 system.”

“One of the more promising candidates for alien life,” Dr. Levin said. “Even so, Kevin, do you understand my problem now? You say you saw these numbers, and I believe you, but maybe you saw them because you’d read them somewhere. I can’t redirect SETI’s resources based on that, and in any case, I’m not sure what else we could do when it comes to the Trappist 1 system. For something like that, I would need something new. Something you couldn’t have gotten another way.”

Kevin could tell that she was trying to let him down as gently as possible, but even so, it hurt. How could he provide them with that? Then he thought about what he’d seen in the lobby. He had to have seen that for a reason, didn’t he?

“I think…” He wasn’t sure whether to say it or not, but he knew he had to. “I think you’re going to get a signal from something called Pioneer 11.”

Dr. Levin looked at him for a couple of seconds. “I’m sorry, Kevin, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”

Kevin saw his mother frown. “What’s Pioneer 11?”