Daily Life With Furry Girls

First Contact

Nuha checked the calibration on her instruments and ran a diagnostic test to make sure what she saw was no instrument failure. There really was a faint signal in the background. She sat back and sighed, running her fingers through her curly brunette hair. It must be coming from some radio station or something, she figured. There were still plenty of people who enjoyed using radio technology to communicate all over the world. But this would mess up her results while she was measuring the physical and electronic properties of the area.

She looked out over the low hills that made up the landscape while all around them was reasonably flat and mostly grass plains. She had come here after hearing by accident from locals that the weather in the hills was always slightly different than around them. The explanation from fellow scientists was that the geological make-up of the area caused a shift in weather patterns but something made her curious and she found from weather data there were several more spots like this on the planet. And none had any similar geological features. Flat forest land, a mountain side, a beach at a desert to name a few. This would be her personal project to finish university with.

Trading a date for borrowing the sensitive instruments for a week from a friend's scientific team, she took them here and set them up to measure the differences between this area and one a little further at the edge of the hills.

She couldn't filter out the interference and it meant she had to find the source, and if it was man-made to persuade whoever it was to change or shut down the transmission. She was glad she had a portable scanner and antenna and put them in her car, then drove in one direction to take a reading on the interference.

When she had driven close to a village just outside the anomalous area she tried to find the transmission but there was none.

'Great, back to the other side.' she said to herself and checked the map to see where she needed to go after getting back to her camp.

After another drive across the hills she turned on the scanner again and cursed under her breath when she couldn't find the signal. Again she took the map and chose another direction. Driving there a faster than she was supposed to had been a waste. Still no signal.

Getting frustrated she returned to her camp and checked the scanner. It did register the interfering signal, even if it was faint. This time she went into the last cardinal direction, stopping regularly to check the signal strength. It was then that she saw the signal fading away the farther she went from her camp. With some disbelief she drove around again to see the interference did seem to come from the centre of the hills itself.

Back at her camp she turned off anything electrical and the signal was still there. Curiosity gradually took over her frustration and she used a booster on the signal. Watching the spectrum analyser for a while made her think the signal was man-made and not a natural phenomenon. It reminded her of music because the beat changed at intervals and there were pauses in between.

It still wasn't strong enough to make out though. She needed a more powerful signal booster.

She took out her phone. 'Hans?' she said when her friend picked up. 'You want another date with me?'

Nuha couldn't believe her ears when she heard the signal after the extra boost and some extra modulation. Although it was still very garbled, someone was speaking in a heavy accent, or what sounded like something from hundreds of years ago, and the music she heard was nothing she recognised. A drum like instrument and wailing singing.

She pondered her options but the only thing she could do was transmit a signal of her own in the same spectrum and hope the other side would react to it. It wasn't a spectrum used by anything in the country so she could safely try it.