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Sounds of Silence
Posted By: Commander Demitri Wolf
Date: 11 November 2005, 5:58 am
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Can You Hear Me Now?
The first transmission came at dawn; Admiral Harker was woken by his XO from the deep slumber he had fallen into and five minutes later was in full dress uniform and standing on the bridge of his Leviathan-class Cruiser, the Dauntless.
"Lieutenant Alderman, where is this signal coming from?"
The young officer at the communications console spun on his seat and faced Harker, "Sir, the Deep Space Relay Probes picked up the signal coming from," he spun back to his console as it beeped, "Holy shit."
"What is it Lieutenant?" the Admiral asked and Alderman turned back slowly,
"Apparently sir, it's coming from the Harvest system."
Harker shook his head in disbelief, Harvest was destroyed! He walked over to the officer's terminal and looked over his shoulder. There, on the screen, was a series of red and blue overlapping lines, at their intersection was a system, Harker looked at the readout next to the image: Harvest System.
"Good god," Harker said, clasping a white-knuckled hand to his mouth, "and this is on the F-Band? Who the hell is transmitting this?" he clicked his tongue and pointed a finger at Alderman, "Isolate that signal," then he turned to the woman at the Navigational console, "how far are we from Harvest system?"
She tapped a few buttons and lines flowed across the screen, "Via Slipspace, ah, a week."
"Damn it," Harker paced before the forward view screen and kicked his heels loudly on the cold floor, "And it's still just clicks and whistles, alert the nearest ship, give them the frequency and band."
1222 Hours, March 17, 2007 (Eastern Standard Time) /
FOX Broadcasting Corporation, California, United States of America
Luke Stephens had worked at Fox for two years, and in that time he had been promoted and demoted more times than he could count. Finally, after his tenth demotion, the regional director of the corporation stuck him somewhere that would keep him out of his way; Advertisements.
Stuck with the dullest position in the company, Stephens was an inch from walking out, when he landed the biggest deal of his career. Three days ago the director called him in for a meeting, when he arrived another man was already there. He was dressed in what Stephens had only ever seen in old movies featuring mad scientists.
His boss introduced the man as Colin Burns, the director of NASA project SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Apparently the program had been draining money from the agency and turning out poor results; more accurately put, they'd found nothing.
Burns had proposed a sort of, joint venture with Fox, in exchange for paying half the cost of having Fox's satellites put into orbit; they would be given rights to use the satellites to beam advertisements, into deep space.
It made sense; both parties saved half the cost of getting the satellites up and running as well as more coverage for Fox and less pressure for results from NASA for Burns. Stephens was put in charge of the project and suddenly his pencil-pushing twenty-five thousand dollar paying career was upgraded to a one and a half hundred thousand dollar dream job with the title of Executive SETI Relations Supervisor.
Everything was fine for a few months until Burns confronted him, "There's been a problem," his boss was furious, Stephens had been slacking off, again, and the program had encountered a huge problem. The cycling software had failed and now the satellites were continuously playing the same thing over and over, the one advertisement was being beamed both into outer space and worldwide, twenty-four hours a day.
Stephens was fired and the SETI-Fox endeavour abandoned, two years later SETI bankrupted NASA and the president had the organisation closed down.
All through this period of time, there was one thing that Fox's director, Cole Burns and Luke Stephens were all thinking, "God damn Verizon."
Alderman's station beeped and cut through the silence like a hot knife trough butter, "Ah, sir, the probes, they've picked up another signal."
"Run it." Harker ordered, and could only stare blankly as the strange and centuries old message relayed it message, to the wrong audience entirely.
Can you hear me now? Good. Can you hear me now? Good. Can you hear me now…
-CDW
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