Decoding

20 3 0
                                    

It all just happened so fast, in a blur of flashing lights and machines I happened to catch a glimpse of as I sped down the halls of the establishment.  The message received from deep in the cosmos came from 7 million light years away.  Intercepted by state of the art satellites in the middle of the Nevada desert.  Printed out from a small and quite simple machine, in the form of dots very similar to Morse code.  The problem that now emerges is reading what this foreign language has to say to us.  I scramble out of my office, the long and skinny paper several yards in length wrapped around my arms and even dangled out to my back off my shoulder looking as if a pathetic cape.  Down the hallways I tumble and fall, sweat and pant to get this slim piece of paper to the boss.  I finally manage to reach the office at the end of the long, twisted hallway.  I barge through the doors and take the paper from my shoulder, roll it up into a wad of paper and slam it on the desk of my boss.

My boss, Emilia Zawalska, is one year older than me and actually my real close colleague.  We've been friends for over five years coming this June.  The thing that made me her under-privileged, lower class ranking official in NASA was the fact that misspelled "Cosmology" in the written assignment to determine who will take the position of the 76 year old retiree.  Not until just recently have I managed to gather up enough balls to actually ask her on a date, and one date led to another, and another, until we’ve been on seven dates total.  We still aren’t official, they were just “business dates”, discussing certain patterns we’ve noticed amongst the suns and planets in our neighboring solar systems.  We are yet to make it official.  Overall, we both are always honest and super comfortable around each other.

“I got…a signal…from space…got the message…right here…” I managed to blurt out between desperate gasps of air.

“What do you mean you got a signal from space?” she asked.

“A message, coded, not from any human intelligence.” I inform her.

Her mouth hangs wide open and immediately grabs the paper from off her desk and begins attempting to decode what the message has to say to us.  The dots on the paper, are grouped together in several clusters with an equal amount of space in between the center of the clusters.  The dots range from filled in and not filled in, every cluster has at least three of each of dot.  No cluster exceeds ten dots, but the spacing of the dots from that of each other in the same cluster differs from every cluster.  There are 11 clusters in total, only two are identical however, which means those two stand for the same letter.  Emilia and I stay in her office for the next three hours, using up an abundance of scratch paper trying to figure out the key to the coded message.  After the three hours, a co-worker of mine knocks and opens the door.

“Boss, the research you told me to do on supernova 26541 is right here” he begins.

Almost as if snapping out of a hypnotic trance, Emilia, lifted her head up, thanked him, and stood up to look out her office window.

“Why you?” she says.

“Pardon me?”

“We have tons of satellites and each one of those satellites sends individual signals to tons of different machines, why has the signal only hit your satellite and only sent the message to you, normally when signals from the space stations are intercepted my multiple satellites and sent to multiple computers and coding machines, how come this time, only your computer and machine received the signal?”

“That…is a great question…” I state

“Alright I don’t think we can decode this signal any time soon here Max, we should call it a day for now, give it to professionals first thing in the morning tomorrow.  It’s late now, go home, go to bed.”

“Yes of course”

I pack my stuff and get up from the chair my ass has been so firmly implanted to make it numb.  I walk into my office, take the car keys from the desk drawer and head out to the parking lot.  Emilia drives up to my car as I get in.

“You know, we never had a real date yet.” She mentions.

“That should be changed” I smile and start my car.

“Yeah, I’d like that” and she drives off.

The ride home was silent, calm.  I got home, ate a quick sandwich, took a shower and completely knocked out the second I stepped in the room.

July 4th, 2076,

I open one eye, then the other, wipe off the eye boogers and look out the window to see day light still present.  I’m late, again.  I grab my clothes of the racks, quickly get dressed and speed to work to get there as fast as possible.  When I arrive, Emilia, stands in front of the doorway to my office.  Her face has a look of discomfort.

“We decoded the message.”

You've reached the end of published parts.

⏰ Last updated: Jan 14, 2015 ⏰

Add this story to your Library to get notified about new parts!

When All Else FailsWhere stories live. Discover now