Twin Earth

Chapter 59

"So, do you think it might be from Rachel?" I asked curiously as I scanned through Yuki's notes whilst following her to a quieter room at the back of the lab.

Closing the door behind us, Yuki pulled down the blinds and switched off the light, then proceeded to turn on a projector from a nearby computer.

"No, I do not think it is from Miss Jenkins, or the planet beyond the barrier..."

"Mochuvia."

"Yes, Mochuvia," Yuki paused with a hint of annoyance at being interrupted. "I believe, and Hayden has also concluded similar findings, that it is in fact a message from whoever created the barrier."

"The creators?" I asked curiously. "But why? What does it say? Have you decoded it?"

"Well, at first we thought it was simply a random set of mathematical fluctuations. A pattern only emerged when we were sent a larger piece of the meteorite from Morocco and placed it down next to the fragments we already had whilst we were working on some dark matter experiments. At first the pattern looked to be incomplete, but we put that down to the fact that we didn't have the whole meteorite to work on. Repeated attempts at gaining access to the much larger piece in Morocco have proven fruitless, especially now it has been removed to an unknown location."

"I see, so what am I seeing here?" I asked, looking up at the wall in front of me to what Yuki was now projecting.

"This table shows the fluctuations from our initial experiments on the fragments you collected, and then this graph shows how those fluctuations changed when we added in the larger piece."

"I see the difference, yes, but how is this a message. From what I can tell it simply looks like a recurring pattern. Could it not just be a natural phenomenon?"

"At first I came to the same conclusion, but Hayden's team looked at scaling up this data by using a computer model to calculate what the fluctuations would look like if we had the whole meteorite fragments that landed in Morocco."

I watched as Yuki flicked to another set of graphs and was astonished to see a pattern laid out in much more detail, which to me almost looked like an image of some kind.

"But we went further. We used Hayden's computer model to scale up the same specifications as if we had the asteroid in its complete form, before it hit the anomaly, and we got this."

"What is that?" I asked, leaning forward and staring in awe at a grainy black and white image of varying grids, dots and dashes. Is that... a star map?" I asked, turning to look at Yuki.

"Yes."

"That's incredible," I breathed loudly.

"That's only a part of it. These next three images were also embedded within the pattern."

I watched as Yuki slowly clicked through to three more images that looked similar in nature, except for the last one.

"This one is different," I announced. "The scale is smaller, why is that?"

"We were hoping you could help us with that. We've discovered that the first three images seem to map out various constellations. The first one here actually features the Andromeda galaxy at the centre between Cassiopeia and Pegasus," Yuki replied, flicking back to the first image.

"The link between us and the creators," I exclaimed excitedly.

"Possibly. It does seem to be central to this set of data. The second map we've linked to a galaxy in the constellation of Ursa Major, a star burst galaxy called Messier 82."

"That's a very active galaxy with bright pulsars and supernovae. Didn't that galaxy collide with a neighbouring galaxy if I'm not mistaken? Could it be possible that's the original home-world of the creators," I pondered intrigued.