First Encounter Page 2

  “Come here, boy!” That was Dr. Grouse’s voice, followed by the sound of him whistling.

  The scene panned around, and Clayton noticed paws galloping in and out of his view as Charlie ran toward his master. Dr. Grouse was stooped down and grinning, clapping for Charlie. “Good boy!” The view shook as he wrestled the Frisbee away and patted Charlie enthusiastically on the head.

  Clayton heard Charlie barking for the doctor to throw the Frisbee again. Those sounds came to Clayton’s ears through miniature speakers built into the frame of the helmet, rather than the comm piece in his ear. Again, Clayton appreciated the less invasive approach.

  “What is this?” he asked, shaking his head. Even his own dreams weren’t this vivid.

  “Amazing, right?” Dr. Reed asked, sounding breathless.

  “This isn’t a dream,” Clayton insisted.

  “Not exactly, no,” Dr. Grouse admitted. “It’s a memory that we’re triggering during an induced REM cycle.”

  “So where does the chimp fit in?” Clayton asked.

  “Archimedes is a receiver like you. He’s watching the same thing,” Dr. Grouse explained. “Now look what happens when we make him the transmitter and you and Charlie the receivers.”

  Clayton’s visor went blank for a second. Then it was replaced by a black grid overlaid on a dark room full of gleaming equipment. Clayton recognized the grid squares as the bars of a cage. Then he saw tiny furry hands wrap around those bars and rattle the cage. The chimp was screaming and jumping up and down, shaking Clayton’s view.

  “This is another memory?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Grouse confirmed.

  Clayton lifted the visor and squinted at him. “How does this help us talk to aliens? You’re telling me we’ll have to sedate them and tie them down before we can communicate with them?”

  Dr. Grouse shook his head quickly. “No. This is just proof that the technology works on non-human subjects. For willing participants the process is much simpler and more dynamic.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “Hang on,” Dr. Grouse said, and spun away, reaching for something in a nearby wall of lockers and cabinets. He opened one of the cabinets to reveal a fourth communicator helmet. Removing it, he connected it to a snaking bundle of wires and cables on the deck, and then spent a moment configuring the helmet. Clayton watched bright screens flashing over the other man’s ARCs. A moment later, Dr. Grouse put the helmet on and pulled the visor down.

  “You need to put your visor down,” Reed said, nodding to Clayton.

  He did as he was told, and saw another access prompt, asking for permission to connect to Visualizer #1. He granted access and an image of a soccer ball appeared on his visor, surrounded by blank, black emptiness. Clayton frowned. If this was all that went on in Dr. Grouse’s head, he was going to have to assign someone else to this project.

  The ball began to roll, and then a potholed road appeared under it, sloping sharply down. Trees, brown grass, bushes, and shrubs appeared on both sides. The ball went skipping down the road, bouncing through potholes on its way to a pebbly beach below. The beach was shaded by tall pine trees creaking in a warm breeze that Clayton was startled to realize he could actually feel. So much for non-invasive. The Visualizer was interacting with his neural implant to produce actual sensations. Good luck getting an alien to feel that breeze, he thought. They’d need reciprocal implants in their brains for that.

  As the ball disappeared into the trees below, the scene began bouncing after it with lanky arms and legs swinging into view. Clayton heard indistinct voices. A child’s pre-pubescent voice shouted back: “Alison kicked it! She should be the one to get it!”

  And with that, the scene faded to black.

  “Now you try,” Dr. Grouse said.

  “Try what?” Clayton muttered, shaking his head.

  “Picture something,” Reed answered. “It can be a memory or just use your imagination.”

  Frowning, Clayton searched his head for a random image or memory of something. His watch with his wife’s smiling face jumped to mind.

  “I see a smart watch,” Dr. Grouse said. “Your wife’s face is the wallpaper.”

  Startled, Clayton forced the image away, blanking his mind.

  “Now it’s gone,” Dr. Grouse said.

  Clayton pushed his thoughts in another direction, and pictured something else. The Earth, orbiting above the dark side of the planet, the glowing orange lines and splotches of city lights clearly visible through scattered wisps of cloud.

  “Earth from orbit at night,” Dr. Grouse said.

  Clayton pushed that thought away, too, and tried something more complex. Pure imagination. He imagined flying like a bird, low over the rippled blue surface of an alien ocean, a pale green sky soaring up from the horizon.

  And Dr. Grouse described all of that, too.

  “This is incredible,” Clayton whispered.

  “I thought you might like it,” Dr. Reed added.

  Clayton reached up and gently pulled the helmet off his head. “But how do we know it will work on an alien species?”

  Dr. Grouse tore off his own helmet and cocked his head in question. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, this is a visual communicator, so what if they don’t have eyes?”

  “We call them Visualizers,” Dr. Grouse said.

  Clayton waved impatiently at him and turned to Reed. “What if their brains work in a way that’s completely foreign to us?”

  Reed shrugged. “Then we can re-calibrate the device. Monkeys and dogs don’t encode memories exactly the same way that we do, and yet we managed to calibrate it for them.”

  “Hmmm,” Clayton replied. “Well then I suppose the only other issue is getting any aliens we meet to cooperate.”

  “If they’re animals, they won’t have a choice,” Dr. Grouse said. “We’ll just sedate them like we did with Charlie and Archimedes.”

  Clayton frowned at that. Standing up from his chair, he thrust the Visualizer into Dr. Grouse’s chest and spent a moment glowering at the other man.

  “What?” Dr. Grouse asked.

  “What if you accidentally sedate a sentient species?”

  “That depends,” Dr. Grouse replied. “Are they more advanced than us?”

  “Do they need to be?”

  “They do if your hypothetical scenario is supposed to be worrisome. Let’s put it another way: what if European explorers had this technology back in the day to communicate with the Native Americans? Imagine they captured and chained up one of the natives in order to subject that person to a Visualizer. Would the outcome have been any worse than what actually happened?”

  “Maybe it would have,” Clayton replied.

  “Who’s to know, but maybe it would have swayed a few people to consider the Natives Americans as equals rather than inferior.”

  Clayton snorted. “That’s optimistic considering humanity’s history. Have you shown this to Ambassador Morgan yet?”

  “More than an hour ago, sir,” Dr. Reed replied. “He’s already coming up with a protocol to follow before we can use the devices.”

  “So he thinks it’s a good idea to use them?” Clayton asked.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t he? If we run into intelligent life, we’re going to need some way to communicate.”

  Clayton glanced between Reed and Dr. Grouse with an unhappy frown. “Can they be used against us?”

  “I can’t imagine how,” Dr. Grouse said.

  “Maybe by reading thoughts and memories that we don’t want them to.” Clayton turned and nodded to the chimp and the Golden Retriever. Both were still knocked out on their respective stretchers. “We were reading their memories without permission. What if some aliens were to do that to us?”

  “That would only work if they knew how to stimulate a particular memory, and that still requires a degree of participation. We were only able to induce the memories you saw from Charlie and Archimedes because we recorded them passivel
y days or weeks ago during one of their dreams. After that, we knew exactly what pathways to stimulate so that we could fire up those memories at will.”

  “That doesn’t rule out coercion,” Clayton pointed out. “You could be forced to think about something.”

  Dr. Grouse smiled patiently at him. “Sir, with all due respect, those are unlikely scenarios. How would aliens that don’t know how to communicate with us in the first place be able to coerce us into using a technology that they don’t even understand? Besides, all of the data exchanges are designed to be logged and monitored by one or more spectators. If we don’t like what we see, we can shut the Visualizers down at a moment’s notice.”

  Clayton saw Dr. Reed bobbing her head along with that. “That’s why the ambassador is working out a protocol. Don’t worry, Captain. We won’t use the Visualizers lightly.”

  Clayton acknowledged that with a grunt. “Can you make them more portable?”

  Dr. Grouse drew himself up. “Of course. That’s the next step. I should have a portable version ready in a matter of hours. I’m planning to work through the night on it.”

  “Dedicated,” Clayton muttered.

  “You know me,” Dr. Grouse replied.

  Clayton jerked his chin to Charlie and Archimedes. “Wake them up.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Grouse replied, and then he turned away and went about removing the helmets from each animal and then unstrapping them from the stretchers. Rather than wake the chimp, Dr. Grouse simply carried him to a cage on the other end of the lab.

  Dr. Reed busied herself with Charlie while he did that, loosening and removing the straps around the dog’s chest and hips. Dr. Grouse returned and the two of them administered an injection in the back of the dog’s neck.

  Charlie woke up with a start and a drawling bark. He struggled to rise, his tongue lolling from his snout, brown eyes wild and darting.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Clayton asked.

  “I just woke him up with an epi shot,” Dr. Grouse replied, struggling to lift the retriever off the stretcher and onto the deck. Paws skittered for a moment before Dr. Grouse let him go. The Retriever ran around the room, barking and jumping up against them.

  Clayton spared a few pats on the head before Charlie ran in another circle. The dog’s wagging tail bumped a silver tray full of spare electrodes and other components onto the deck, and scattered them with his paws as he came back around for another pass at Clayton and Dr. Reed.

  But Charlie came to a skidding stop just before he reached them. His tongue vanished into his mouth and white teeth flashed out in a snarl. He was looking past Clayton to the door. Then he began barking and snarling.

  “Whoa, hey there boy,” Dr. Grouse said, going down on his haunches beside the dog. “What’s the matter, huh?” he asked while stroking Charlie’s back.

  Charlie barked and growled some more.

  Clayton turned to follow the dog’s gaze, but he didn’t see whatever had the creature so spooked. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked, turning back to Dr. Grouse.

  “I don’t know. He’s usually so calm.”

  Clayton glanced back at the door. He noticed the gleaming window beside it. Maybe Charlie had seen someone out in the corridor watching them. Or maybe he was barking at his own reflection in the window. Hard to tell with a dog.

  “He’s acting like he saw a ghost,” Reed said.

  “A ghost that only he can see?” Clayton countered.

  “Maybe it’s a ghost that only he can smell,” Dr. Grouse replied, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

  Reed laughed, and Clayton frowned. Charlie still hadn’t looked away from the door, and his teeth were still bared, but at least he wasn’t barking anymore.

  Clayton stifled a sigh. “Well, doctors, this has been interesting. Let me know if you have any further breakthroughs.”

  “Aye, sir,” Reed replied.

  “Sure,” Dr. Grouse added.

  Clayton turned and waved the door open before breezing out into the corridor. He considered heading back to his quarters. Technically he was off-duty, but he decided to head up to the bridge and check in with the officer of the watch instead.

  Maybe Commander Taylor had an update to share about those blips they’d been tracking.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Laurisa Reed was still in the comms lab at midnight, trading mental images back and forth with Dr. Grouse. It was a game of associations, a silent conversation. This was the hope for human-alien communication, should it ever occur—that they could at least trade images of their experiences and views in order to hopefully understand one another.

  And even if the Visualizers couldn’t be configured to read alien brains, their output could still be sent to a holo projector or a screen so that a given alien species would get to see what humanity had to say.

  Dr. Grouse sent her an image of a sunflower. She sent a whole field of them back. He sent a little girl skipping through that field. Her mind added the sound of the little girl laughing.

  But that laughter died as her thoughts took a sharp right turn into a place filled with fear and despair. A snapshot of her at the hospital lying on a stretcher after her third miscarriage. The look on her then-fiance, Paul’s face as they listened to the doctor telling them that they could keep trying, but that their chances were slim. Surrogacy was an option. Paul had stood by her while they looked into options. He’d gone through the motions. Her mind wandered to the last time she’d seen him, their fight, her chasing him out into the rain as he ran to his car. The taillights blazing crimson as his wheels spun on the rain-slicked streets to get away.

  Her inability to have children had been the beginning of the end for them, and then the engagement ended just like all of the failed pregnancies.

  “Ah... Lori, are you okay?”

  She shook herself out of the memories, embarrassed and worried about how much Dr. Grouse had seen through the Visualizers. None of it was news to him, but it was certainly off topic.

  “I’m fine. Sorry.”

  This was the main problem with the technology. Visualizers gave a glimpse into another person’s head, but people have filters for a reason. Mental imagery is a shit show of random associations with very little sense to it. A river of consciousness roaring by. With a deliberate and sustained effort people can control the flow for a while and keep their thoughts on relevant topics, but the random associations were still there, a powerful current roaring underneath, ready to derail any meaningful conversation.

  “Let’s try something else,” Dr. Grouse said.

  An image of a rock and a feather falling in vacuum tubes popped into her head. They were both falling at the same rate, an extension of Galileo’s contention that objects fall to Earth at the same rate regardless of their mass.

  That was a good visual illustration of a higher level concept that any advanced species with a proper understanding of mass and gravity should recognize.

  Lori replied with a mental image of her holding out both hands, giving two thumbs up. “We should add that one to the list of conversation starters.”

  “Definitely,” Dr. Grouse replied.

  Their conversation went on for a while, firing back and forth with images of scientific breakthroughs and concepts. Another good conversation starter was a 2D illustration of the universe, starting from a singularity and expanding to a larger and larger size. That one image conveyed the Big Bang Theory and the expansion of the universe at the same time. Hopefully any aliens looking at it would understand what they were seeing from the glittering stars and the over-sized spiral galaxies depicted in each progressively larger bubble of the universe. If not, it might turn out to be a head-scratcher.

  Lori pulled her helmet off with a sigh and rubbed tired, scratchy eyes. Her vision was blurry from staring at the inside of her visor for so long, and it took a few seconds to clear it.

  Dr. Grouse pulled off his helmet and spent a moment vigorously scratching his scalp, itchy from long hours of
electrodes pressing the hair against his skin.

  Lori checked the clock in the top left of her ARCs. It was after midnight. The ship’s clock was set to the same time as Cape Canaveral, where they’d launched from, though by now those clocks were wildly out of sync.

  “We should get some sleep,” Lori said.

  “You go ahead, I’m going to stay a while and see if I can log some dreams from Charlie and Archimedes.”

  Lori nodded to him as she rose from her chair, and breezed out of the gleaming comms lab. She followed the corridor outside past several bio and agro labs to the ring running around the central column of elevators. She hit the call button with her ARCs and pre-selected the crew deck.

  One of the elevators opened with a two-tone chime, and she stepped in, riding it up. On the crew deck, the corridors were all still and empty. She spotted a lone officer walking by. He glanced her way and she inclined her head to him. His glowing blue name tape read: Lt. Paulson.

  Her ex-fiance, Paul flashed into her mind again, and she looked away with a grimace. Not that she was still hung up on him, but Paul was an unwelcome reminder of why she’d come on this mission in the first place. She didn’t have any attachments back home for a reason.

  Reaching her room, Lori stood in front of the blinking red light of the door scanner. She mentally opened the door as soon as the light burned green, having recognized her identity.

  She stepped in to find the lights already on and turned down to dim, night-cycle yellows. A familiar person was lounging on the small two-seater gray couch opposite her bunk and kitty corner to the room’s viewscreen.

  “Ambassador Morgan,” she began, her brain was too tired to remember that she could call him by his first name when no one else was around. Her stride faltered as she came within a few feet of him. The door slid automatically shut behind her.