Peripheral Visions: Friends We'll Never Meet

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Friends We'll Never Meet

Professor Todd Quivey tried to see the world as his audience saw it and adjust his comments – and his bearing – to match. He paused at the lectern to look around the auditorium. In the back of his mind he was thinking about how he'd always imagined a meeting like this would take place behind closed doors, with a bunch of white guys, all of them military, sitting at a long table. The reality was different: There were TV cameras pointed at him, and the auditorium's seats were filled with journalists, women, people of color, delegates from other nations. Plenty of military, too; yes, and they were the ones Quivey most wanted to reach. They would see this situation as a threat. Well, they were right: The unknown was always a threat. But he had to persuade them that it was an also an opportunity.

"Ladies, gentlemen, let's start with the facts before we begin speculating," Quivey said, "because speculation quickly goes nowhere useful. The facts as we know them right now: An alien spacecraft has landed in South Dakota." He tapped the remote in his hand and the screen behind him was filled with the image of a starfield. A yellow arrow pointed to a fleck of light. "We know it's of extrasolar origin because defense installations and observatories tracked its progress through our solar system. It was moving in excess of 200,000 kilometers per hour when it was first spotted, just inside the orbit of Neptune, and it held that speed until it was midway between Mars and Earth. We expected the Sun's gravity to pull it in faster and faster, but instead the object started slowing down. Then, the object veered off course, heading straight for Earth."

Quivey tabbed the remote again and the image shifted to a photo of the object in false color. It was oblong, but not rounded; rather, it resembled the Washington Monument, if the Monument were to been seen reflected in water: Symmetrical, tapering at both ends to pyramidal caps. The object was dark – not black, but a dark ash gray – and it was featureless. Quivey considered reciting the object's physical dimensions – forty-two meters in length, nine meters at its widest point in the middle. A voice from the audience distracted him.

"We tracked it the whole way," an officer whose chest was heavy with adornments spoke up from the front row.

Quivey nodded at him, thinking the man's many pips and braids must mean he was a general. He wasn't the head of the Joint Forces; that would be Gen. Dennis Jiménez, who sat on the stage in a chair next to the one in which Quivey himself had been seated a few minutes earlier. The two of them were due to confer with a Dr. Brollard in a few days' time. Brollard was a noted astrobiologist and comparative planetologist. He was also making the rounds of talk shows and podcasts, offering up his theories about the object – something Quivey thought reckless as well as premature.

Quivey focused on the here and now and explained the general's comment to the audience. "Global attention to the object ensured that we have a complete record of its progress over the last fifteen months," he said. "When we thought it was a comet, the object excited great enthusiasm and curiosity. When it began to decelerate, it piqued great scientific interest, and that's when the first claims started circulating that it must be an alien spaceship."

"Remember 'Oumuamua!" someone shouted, and a ripple of laughter through the room broke a tension Quivey hadn't realized was there. Quivey, too, smiled. "Good point," he said. "Interstellar objects crossing our solar system are nothing new. We spot them every year or so now that we have so many orbiting telescopes. They have always been a natural part of our relationship with the cosmos.

"But an object that decelerates when you'd expect it to speed up? Or sharply corrects its course? There were only a few who argued that these developments could have been caused by natural factors. For most of the scientific community it was evident that this object is artificial." Quivey called up the next slide, and the screen filled with the now-famous image of the object hovering upright over a muddy field. Trees and a river filled the background. The dark gray object looked incongruous, but also mundane. Only the way it hung there, its tapered bottom mere centimeters from the ground, made it look strange, even frightening.

"Since the object's landing in South Dakota six days ago, we've had the chance to photograph it, subject it to scans, even walk up and touch it," Quivey said, advancing through the next series of images: The same photo, only as seen in different wavelengths of light: Infra-red. X-ray. The object looked a little different in each slide, but also mostly the same.

"The object isn't radioactive," Quivey said, "so you can ignore the false reports that it's sending out gamma rays." Another tap of the remote brought up a series of slides: More views of the object, some from close up. "We see no sign of a hatch or other entry point. We see no signs of external hardware. There are no lights, no pipes, nothing that looks like an antenna... not even any seams or rivets, though it's possible those could be obscured. There's no sign of writing anywhere on the hull, though again that could be obscured by the object's dark gray coating, which we think could be organic matter the object picked up as it traveled between stars. We tried to scrape a little off but got nothing, so perhaps the gray coloration is a property of..." Quivey shrugged. "...whatever the object is made of. We think it may be a polymer of some sort, but our passive means of analysis have yielded no meaningful results and we're hesitant, as of now, to try more aggressive approaches such as attempting to cut a piece off."

Quivey paused. The audience didn't respond to that, though he'd tried to put a slightly comic spin on the words, a suggestion of "we don't want to poke the bear." People must really be scared, he thought. He didn't blame them.

Turning back to the image on the screen, Quivey pointed and said, "Though there's no external sign of a drive system, the object clearly has a means of propulsion and steering. The object landed itself quite neatly and precisely; it's standing, or rather hovering, at a perfectly perpendicular angle over a flat, stable area. Obviously, the object is capable of canceling gravity, though we have no idea how." Quivey couldn't help glancing at the audience with a self-deprecating smile; he was, after all, famous for having determined the nature of gravity and reconciled it with the so-called Theory of Everything.

"Now, the next question: Is it manned? Doubtful. The object is just too small to be a spaceship with a crew. There has been speculation that the object might contain one or two individuals in a state of suspended animation. But remember: It's been traveling for a long, long time. The stars in our galaxy are so distant from one another that it's a safe bet this object was launched at least fifty, probably more like sixty, or even a hundred thousand years ago."

A murmur arose in the room.

"Or longer," Quivey added. "It's been traveling long enough to show signs of space weathering, mostly from cosmic rays, but there's also some pitting and scoring that we think is the result of entering the solar system and encountering micrometeors. In more poetic terms, it's suffered some erosion from starlight."

There was another ripple of laughter and more murmuring in the room.

Quivey turned back to the screen and brought up another slide. "There are also traces of tholins on its surface – not a surprise if it's been out there for thousands, maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, but what is surprising is that there are only traces of tholins, not a substantial buildup. That suggests that the object performs some sort of self-maintenance."

Turning back to the audience, Quivey said, "All of this points to a conclusion – tentative, but likely – that this is a probe, a self-directed exploratory craft that's capable of going into a power-saving 'sleep mode' for long stretches of time – thousands of years – and then waking up and responding as it draws close to possible destinations, or possible dangers, like our solar system with its comets, asteroids, and planets."

"Could it be a missile?" someone called out.

"That's the next question," Quivey nodded. "Could it be a weapon? Or could it be, as some have speculated online, a portal that will suddenly activate a doorway and enable invaders to come storming onto Earth? We don't know anything for sure at this point, but let's not fuel panic. All our observations so far indicate that the object is subject to the same laws of physics as any technology here on Earth. Physicists have been able to teleport single photons over a very short distance – but opening a wormhole? That would take a huge amount of power – the equivalent of turning the mass of Saturn into pure energy. If something like that is even possible, it would involve technology we can't imagine, and this while probe is more advanced than anything we have, nothing we've observed about it suggests forms of technology we haven't theorized about. In short, the aliens who built this are more advanced than we are, but we don't think it's by much. We have designs for interstellar probes that are decades old and that could take our scientific instruments to other planets with voyages of thirty or forty thousand years."

Quivey sighed, then thought he shouldn't have; it might make him appear tired or impatient. Trolls would have a field day making memes of that moment: Ivory tower egghead scoffs at common people. Such memes had begun circulating even before today's press conference. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now except make what he had to say as compelling as possible.

Quivey held up his hands. "I have to stress at this point that while the object might be dangerous, it's just as likely, and probably more so, that the object is not dangerous at all. Let's start with the obvious fear: That the object's arrival signals some sort of invasion. Well, it's not much of an invasion so far. It's one object – one. Not a fleet. Is it a scout of some kind? Maybe, but it's doubtful the object was send with hostile intentions. If the object is here to size us up for possible conquest, it would need to send a signal home in order to report in – and unless they are using some sort of quantum entanglement communication, that signal will be limited to the speed of light. That means it would take years for the message to arrive back to the alien home world. More to the point, any invasion fleet they want to send would take millennia to get here. That would be such a resource-intensive undertaking it's hard to imagine they'd benefit from it. And in any case, we'd have plenty of time to prepare for them."

Quivey turned back the screen, thumbed the remote, and turned off the projector. Setting the remote on the lectern, he said, "And let's think about motive. Why cross that much space to invade another inhabited planet? Do they want resources? It's an awfully long way to go, when your own solar system probably has more raw material than you'd ever use, everything from the solar energy of your sun to the ice water in comets and the minerals in asteroids. Even if they did come all this way looking for resources, why land your probe on a planet? Anything we have down here on Earth, aliens can get more easily from the asteroid belt or the Oort Cloud without having to waste energy hauling it up out of the planet's gravity well.

"But here's the other thing: The object flew right through the asteroid belt; it ignored the moons of Saturn and Jupiter; it ignored Mars. When it comes to raw materials, Earth has nothing that other regions of the solar system can't offer with less bother."

"Except us," someone called.

"What if they like the taste of human meat?" someone else yelled.

Quivey couldn't help a skeptical look, which he instantly regretted, again picturing the memes it would generate, the online accusations of being out of touch and dismissive, just another arrogant intellectual. But he didn't have time to dwell on every nuance: Inflammatory speculations had to be addressed without equivocation.

"I don't know if they're here to serve man," Quivey said, opting for a dose of levity since he'd already revealed his skepticism, "but I'm pretty sure it makes no sense for them to... well, serve man, as in, for dinner. Like on that 'Twilight Zone' episode. I'm sure you know the one I mean."

Quivey was none too sure anyone would know what he meant, but there was another ripple of laughter, so some in the audience caught the reference.

"Here's what I mean," Quivey said. "Whoever built and launched the object, they are, by definition, aliens – independently evolved forms of life. There's no reason to think we're biologically compatible with them in any way, and that includes as a food source. Also, let's remember the scales involved in space travel. This is not even an accurate comparison, but imagine you or I setting out on foot hoping that we'll eventually end up on some other continent and find, just by chance, a hamburger joint. I've heard of takeout, but..."

The laughter this time wasn't a ripple so much as a roar.

Quivey allowed himself a smile. "I'm not saying there's no danger. This could be a probe designed to locate habitable planets and then land there and serve as a marker – or a beacon. But when it comes to worrying that it's real estate the aliens want, let's remember they evolved on a different planet. There's no reason to think that our environment on Earth would be suitable for them. It's more likely they would need to terraform the Earth in some way – change its atmosphere, maybe – to make it suitable for their needs. And why terraform an already-inhabited planet? We've catalogued half a million extrasolar planets already, and none of them exhibit signs of life we can detect through atmospheric analysis or by listening with our radio telescopes. Why come here looking for a new place to live when there's so much free land just waiting out there for anyone with the technology to come and claim it?

"And again, there's the time and distance involved. Migrating to another solar system means crossing dozens or even hundreds of light years on a journey that takes tens of thousands of years. If you're going to build inhabited spaceships that can spend so much time between stars, then why shouldn't they serve as permanent homes? Why colonize planets at all? If anyone here has read the 'Macrolife' books, then you'll know that writer George Zebrowski asked a fundamental question: Once you take to space and adapt to life among the stars, there's no need to live on a planet again. Why would you want to? Why not create habitats in hollowed-out asteroids, which can wander the cosmos while providing their inhabitants with perfectly controlled living conditions?"

"But that's science fiction!" someone yelled.

Quivey held up a hand. "This very situation is also science fiction," he replied. "Or it was, until it happened. Now it's scientific and historical fact. Let me quote Zebrowski again: 'Science fiction is a way of rehearsing the future.' Well, I'd say the future has found us."

***

"Nice speech the other day," Dr. Flores said.

"Thanks," Quivey answered her, barely looking up from his tablet. He was sitting at his desk at NASA, a desk in a disused office that he been hurriedly set up for their use.

"Did you have that meeting with the president afterwards?" Flores asked. Her desk was on the other side of the small room. Usually they didn't even notice each other, absorbed in their work, but once in a while Flores liked to take her eyes off her computer screen, stretch, and maybe try to make conversation.

"Yes," Quivey answered, "and half her cabinet and probably the entire staff of the Pentagon." He gestured with the tablet in his hand. "It was... productive."

Flores chuckled. "I bet."

"But I got my point across. We have more to learn from the object than we have reasons to fear it, at least for now." Quivey looked up. "And, honestly, I can't imagine that will change."

"You don't think the object will turn out to be dangerous?"

"Realistically? No." Quivey looked back at his tablet, then looked up again. "For one thing, would a species that achieved that level of space flight be aggressive?"

"We're aggressive," Flores said. "With a long history of colonizing that includes exterminating the local inhabitants, enslaving them, and stealing their property."

"True," said Quivey.

"And you said yourself that we could build a similar probe at our current level of technology."

"Also true," Quivey said, "with the exception of their obvious mastery of gravity. We have nothing like that. But there's another important distinction here. We could build probes to other solar systems, but we haven't. They actually did it. We've been building new stealth bombers when we could have been creating a new fleet of space shuttles, and commissioning new aircraft carriers and spy satellites when we could have been contributing more meaningfully to the International Space Station. We have no interstellar probes... although we do have a whole new class of hunter-killer satellite. I think that says something about their priorities, and ours."

"And that's the very reason why you've worked so hard to still the raging waters of fear and warmongering?" Flores asked.

"Yes," Quivey told her, "and especially quell the most aggressive voices demanding we take preemptive measures against rival powers here on Earth who might want to exploit the object. If some of these people had their way, all any alien race bent on conquest would ever have to do would be drop a probe on us, like the one in South Dakota, and let us do the rest. We're holding it together for now, but sometimes I'm afraid we're gonna tear our own world apart. And why? Because someone from the dark far reaches of the universe happened to show us something they made, let us know they are out there? Does that make any sense?"

Flores gave him a long look – long enough that Quivey glanced up again from his tablet. "What?" he asked.

"Been getting some online hate, have we?"

Quivey snorted. "Not since Fauchi has a scientist gotten the kind of blowback I'm dealing with. Well, actually, the Secret Service, the FBI, and Homeland Security are dealing with it. But it's not just random cranks and trolls in China. Some of our own lawmakers want me arrested. I'm not sure what the charges would be. Not that it matters." Quivey sighed and returned to his tablet.

"Being a voice of reason in a hurricane of madness," Flores said. "That's all it takes."

***

"Here's the question you didn't answer at the press conference," Gen. Jiménez, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. "You had all kinds of reasons why the alien probe isn't here to scope us out for invasion, or to blow us all up, or to unleash some sort of alien virus. But why are they here?"

"Maybe they're here out of friendship," Dr. Brollard said.

"Then why did they just drop in like this?" Gen. Jiménez asked drily. "Without calling ahead first? Is that any way to signal friendship?"

"Maybe they did try to call ahead first," Brollard said. "We've been running an experiment at Lawrence Livermore Lab on the controlled use of entangled particles for communication. We detected patterns of spin change that we didn't initiate – spin change that could have been a signal."

"Quivey?" Gen. Jiménez turned his interrogating gaze on the physicist. "You mentioned something about that. Could the probe be transmitting a message?"

Quivey nodded, but he had another explanation. "For that to be true, the spin change of the particles in Dr. Brollard's experiment would have to be entangled with particles being used by the probe. When would that have happened?"

Gen. Jiménez threw an annoyed look at Dr. Brollard.

"At LIGO we detected gravity waves," Quivey added. "Certain traits in the data convinced me that they originate from a source here on Earth. The object is the only thing I can think of that might be generating them."

"It's using gravity waves as a means of communication?" Gen. Jiménez asked.

"Why not?" Quivey replied. "Why do we assume aliens would have evolved eyes like ours, ears like ours, senses like ours? We look for light – visible or invisible, laser pulses or radio waves. But what if whales developed astronomy and cosmology? Would they scan the heavens listening for something like their whale songs, only using gravity waves propagated through space-time instead of sound waves propagated through water?"

"Like in that 'Star Trek' movie," Brollard scoffed.

"The point is, we don't know anything," Quivey argued. "Instead of bringing our biological and historical prejudices to the situation, maybe it would be better to observe, maybe even try to initiate contact ourselves."

"Just walk up to their ship, knock on the door and say howdy," Gen. Jiménez snorted.

"Well, sir, it's probably a probe, and it doesn't seem to have a door," Quivey pointed out. "But all the same, that might be the right approach. Maybe we see if we can determine whether those gravity waves are a message, and what sense we can make of them. Then, maybe we try to send an answer back and see if we can get a conversation going."

"With what? The probe's onboard computer? Didn't you say that was most likely what was driving it?"

"Yes sir, but it's possible that the probe's AI is equipped to make contact with other species it happens to encounter. Maybe that's why it diverted course and landed here."

"Or it's here to do some kind of assay on our resources," Gen. Jiménez snapped.

"We don't know for sure, General," Quivey said. "For all we know it's making maps, rather than scouting for resources. Or maybe its primary purpose is to look for intelligent life. The best way to find out is to try to talk to it."

General Jiménez looked at Brollard. "Thoughts?"

Brollard shrugged. "I agree. Though I think it would also be worth looking more closely at the possibility that the probe is using quantum entanglement as a means of communication. Although..." Brollard looked at Quivey. "You're the expert on gravity here. If you think they probe is using gravity waves to send signals, then I agree it's worthy trying to decode what the message might be."

"And then we broadcast friendship messages at it?" Gen. Jiménez asked. "Or maybe let it know that if it has any hostile intentions toward us, we will defend ourselves?"

Quivey nodded, keeping his face impassive. Inwardly he was exasperated at the general's constant focus on aggression, but he didn't see any point in antagonizing him. "Yes, sir. Or, alternatively, we could wait and see if they take the initiative."

"What if their initiative is to blow us all up?"

"If that's what they want, why would they delay?" Brollard asked, before Quivey could make the same point. "And if that's what they intend, how would we stop them anyway?

"But here's another idea to consider," Brollard added. "What if they aren't aliens? What if this probe is from the future? What if hundreds or thousands of years from now our own descendants learn how to travel through time and come back to the present – a point in time when the Earth is still habitable – and then they colonize their own planet? They obviously have superior technology. They must have clean energy, ecologically sustainable tech... They could wipe us out, settle in, and have a forever home instead of whatever burnt-out, toxic mess we leave them."

Quivey suppressed a sigh. That was one of the theories Brollard was flogging on the podcasts. Quivey could think of dozens of reasons why the theory didn't add up, one of them being that the object had clearly come from a point in space beyond the solar system, but he held his peace. After all, he reasoned, who was to say time travel didn't involve some element of space travel as well?

General Jiménez had a different objection. "If people from the future wipe us out, wouldn't they be creating a paradox in which they never existed?"

Brollard looked at Quivey. It was obvious Brollard hadn't thought about that.

"Not necessarily," Quivey answered, his physicist's mind working the question. "It could be a kink in causality, rather than an outright paradox. They exist in the future in order to come back to the past and change the past, but having come back they then persist into a different future that's not reliant on how things were in the first version of history."

General Jiménez frowned, looking like he didn't comprehend.

"They split a whole new parallel universe off from the one we live in now, and create an alternate future," Brollard said, picking up in Quivey's line of reasoning.

"Again," Quivey says, "we don't know. Wild guesses are less likely than careful observation to lead us to a more considered theory, and a more effective course of action."

"We'd better decide on some kind of action, and soon," Gen. Jiménez said. "Even if we do nothing, other nations are getting nervous. The Russians. The Chinese. India."

"In that case, it would probably be prudent to gather as much information as we can as quickly as we can, but at the same time make preparations in case the probe does turn out to be hostile – and hopefully our fellow humans won't trip us, or each other, up with rivalries or sabotage," Quivey said.

"How long?" Gen. Jiménez asked. "How long do you need to figure all this out, and what sort of support?"

Quivey and Brollard looked at each other.

"Well...." Quivey said.

***

Before week's end, LIGO had the additional finding it needed and was already adding staff to the newly created Gravitational Wave Communication Project.

"GAWP," Dr. Flores joked. Quivey had brought her on as deputy director of the project. She called herself his first officer or, when she was feeling buoyant (which seemed to be most of the time), his Number One.

Quivey looked at her, but his expression was that of a man whose mind was somewhere else.

"Todd?" she asked. "You dreaming up some new theory? A new decoding approach, I hope."

"It's just..." Quivey shook his head. "Marta's got – "

"Who?"

"Marta. Przybylski. Grad student."

"I can't keep track of them all," Flores said.

"I know, right? We're pulling anybody and everybody in. This project has become a whirlpool of brainpower. Anyway, Marta has some new work that's showing... well, it looks like the gravity waves we're seeing aren't a message at all. There's no signal in that noise."

"As I suspected. It's like a motorcycle sitting there idling," Flores said. "A powerful engine, a noisy engine, but nothing more."

He looked at her.

"I love me a hog," she said.

That was right; he had forgotten she was a motorcycle enthusiast.

"But that's not what you're thinking about," Flores said.

Quivey nodded. "It occurred to me that..." He sighed. "Jiménez asked me the other day why the object is here. I've been thinking about that ever since it got here, and... well, let me ask you: Why do you suppose the probe landed here?"

Flores shrugged. "Because we're here. It means to make contact. Or, if Jiménez is right, it's here to size us up and then eradicate us."

"But is it?" Quivey walked across the room, headed for a white board and still talking. Flores was obliged to follow him. "Now, bear with me for a minute. Isn't it another of our prejudices to think that an alien race would go out of its way to try to talk to us? Even if they want to find others in the cosmos, why would they use a probe for that purpose, going slowly from star to star rather than using radio signals or laser pulses that travel at the speed of light and can be detected from many potentially inhabited worlds?"

"Maybe they sent out thousands of probes. Or millions," Flores said.

Quivey shook his head. "Whatever their biology, whatever their thought processes, evolution doesn't reward waste. You asked me once if the aliens are really more advanced than we are? I think they must be, just because they're clearly taking the initiative to cross the distance between the stars. But not to communicate." Quivey shook his head. "I keep thinking about the Copernican principle."

"I should know that. I do know that. I'm blanking," Flores said. "That's not... no, I'm thinking of Occam's Razor. What's the Copernican Principle?"

"That we don't have a privileged position in the universe."

"Right. Of course," Flores said. "Essentially, the cosmos does not revolve around us."

"The more I think about it, the more I feel convinced that the probe would be here even if we weren't. I think it's more a matter of... well, Earth is a convenient place to set down."

"Because...?"

"Because Earth has the right properties. Not too big, not too small, not too hot. Let's consider this: Why send probes into the universe? To scout? To map? Or to make some kind of material return on the investment of building and deploying them?"

"So... the aliens are, what? Capitalists?" Flores asked.

"Or just practical," Quivey said. "Have you cross referenced our tacking data on the object with earlier observations of the Oort Cloud? Between two and fifteen years before we monitored the object crossing Saturn's orbit, there were indications of gravitational anomalies in the Oort Cloud. Remember we thought there might be another Distant World?"

Flores nodded. "We still do. We've suspected for centuries there might be a Planet X out there. Then we found two Earth-sized planets well outside the orbit of Eris... and they still don't account for all the gravitational perturbations we observe."

"The Far Horizons probe flew past one of those Distant Worlds," Quivey said. "The Sheffield Telescope discovered the other. But the anomalous readings we were getting couldn't be explained by the Far Worlds we knew about."

"I thought those anomalies were written off as statistical noise. Processing errors."

"In all of the analyses? From everyone who made observations and measurements?" Quivey shook his head. "I don't buy that. I think it's more likely that the object was out there doing some sort of work. Mining, refining, maybe sending care packages back the way it came."

"Really?" Flores looked at him askance. "I thought you were arguing against the idea that the aliens wanted to travel all that way to harvest resources?"

"I'm wondering if I was thinking about it all wrong. Not imagining a greater scale of time. How long would it take to deplete the resources of an entire solar system?"

"Depends on the solar system," Flores said. "Our sun is third-generation star, so our system has a full array of elements from the periodic table. Older star systems might be poorer in some of the elements."

"Yes. Right. And if those stars host life, that life could be billions of years older than us."

"Okay, so, are you just spitballing here, or...?"

"I started thinking about this due to some observations we've made on the object. You've seen how it has completely restored itself in the last few weeks. It arrived here looking the way we'd expect Voyager 1 and 2 to look after thirty or forty thousand years of interstellar travel. But now the object looks pristine. It can obviously manipulate matter in some way. Assuming a sufficiently stable, long-lasting civilization exists out there, doesn't it make sense to think they might have eventually used up everything close to hand and started launching probes that can mine and refine resources from other solar systems – and then send them home in a steady trickle?"

"Send them home how?"

"By constructing mini probes designed to haul a payload. You know, we've got some rudimentary designs for craft like that, ourselves. They'd use nanotechnology. They'd be self-replicating. They could spread through the galaxy and start sending back a constant supply of raw materials. Just little bit from each delivery, and it would take millennia to get the supply chain moving, but once they started arriving, there'd be a steady rain of deliveries from all over the sky."

"Manna from the heavens... " Flores shook her head, smiling. "You really think that's what's going on here?"

"It makes more sense than the idea that this is either a first contact or some sort of prelude to alien aggression. I think that probe spends eons going from system to system, finding useful stuff, packing it up and sending it home, and doing a spot of self-repair as and when needed. Eventually, it would head to the next solar system, and start the process all over again. I was talking at the press conference about the object maybe being launched a hundred thousand years ago? In principle, it could have been operating for millions of years... maybe longer."

"And you said Jiménez is making wild assertions. But now whose having flights of fancy?" Flores teased him.

Quivey didn't hear her. He was too engrossed in his theorizing. "I think those gravity waves are a byproduct. In fact, as we get more detailed data, I find myself thinking that the probe isn't just producing gravity waves; I think it uses gravity as fuel."

"What?"

"Don't look at me like I'm crazy. I've done some preliminary number crunching, and the calculations are very promising."

"But use gravity as fuel?"

"I don't know exactly how," Quivey admitted. "But using gravity as an energy source is perfectly plausible, and it's endless, free energy at that. Which brings me back to the Copernicus principle. Earth is an ideal size and mass – and therefore entails an ideal gravity well – for a probe powered by gravity to take a break, freshen up, and recharge itself. Look, I can prove the principle to you..."

Quivey picked up a marker and scrawled equations on the white board. When he ran out of room he used his shirt sleeve to erase part of his scribblings and filled the blank space with new equations.

At last, he came to the end of his demonstration. Flores shook her head. "I see," she said.

"The probe could be doing this anywhere... in any solar system where there's a suitable planet or other mass to come to rest and refuel," Quivey said. "Not a gas giant, not an ice giant, not a tiny moon or a scrawny planet like Mars or Mercury. And not a hot hellhole like Venus. In our solar system, Earth is the ideal place for the object to do its self-maintenance before it either goes back to the Oort Cloud and resumes its mining operations, or it travels to another solar system.

"In other words, it doesn't matter that we're here," Quivey said. "The probe isn't looking for other forms of life. It's just doing its job."

Flores shook her head. "We need to see Jiménez," she said.

***

"So you think this probe is using the Earth as a rest stop?" Jiménez said.

"More or less, yes, sir."

Jiménez frowned at Quivey.

"Which means, sir, there's no reason to think it's hostile. It's simply going about its pre-programmed routine."

"And those gravity waves, you don't think they are a coded message of some kind?"

"I really don't think so, sir. We've analyzed them for weeks. We've run them through the quantum mainframe at UCLA, and run them independently through MIT's quantum processor network, and we're finding repetition, but no real signal."

"So, the aliens don't care that we're here."

"Sir, I don't think the aliens expect anyone to be here. Or anywhere, for that matter. I mean... suppose they've been sending these probes out for millennia, or maybe even eons. By now they have a nice steady stream of incoming raw materials sourced from all over the galaxy. Let's assume that over all that time, despite sending probes out every which way, they have never encountered another intelligence. Let's assume that if intelligent life is out there – other than ourselves and the aliens who built the object – then it's extremely rare. The aliens have no reason to plan for any such thing as a first contact. By extension, they have no hostile intentions. They have no reason to think we exist."

"And when that probe tells them about us, assuming it hasn't already?" Jiménez asked.

"I don't think it has or will. I think the probe just does what it does, independent of oversight from its home planet. After all, the lag time for any communication would be measured in decades, if not centuries, so what would the point be? No, sir, I think that object uses gravity as a power source, and those emissions we detected are the equivalent of... I don't know... exhaust from an idling motor."

"Or engine noise," Flores, who was standing beside him in front of the general's desk, said.

Quivey rolled his eyes. "Yes, or engine noise. Like a cosmic Harley."

"What?" Jiménez didn't look amused; he looked perplexed.

"The point is, as far as we can tell, the probe is entirely automated. It has never responded to any of our research teams, not even when they made physical contact with it and tried to image its insides." An exercise that had yielded no result, Quivey thought, but that was a different discussion. "It's the simplest of robots. It follows its predetermined set of instructions and ignores everything else because it has no directives for doing anything outside its normal operations."

"So, you're saying that in a little while, once it completes its renovations and juices up, that probe will just lift off again?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then the time is now!" Jiménez rose from behind his desk and started pacing.

"Sir?"

"We have to destroy it."

Quivey stopped breathing for a moment. He was in shock at the general's declaration. "Why?"

"Or what?" Jimenez turned to glare at Quivey. "We just let it go back to mining the Oort Cloud for water, or minerals, or whatever else it wants?"

Quivey and Flores glanced at each other. "Well... why not?"

Jimenez raised a finger. "Because it's trespassing. It's an intruder." He raised another finger. "Because it's stealing our resources."

"It's not like we can access the treasures of the Oort Cloud anyway," Flores said.

"Not yet, but who knows? In a century or two we may need those resources ourselves. If they ran out of raw materials and had to travel to other stars to get more, why won't we? And if that probe takes material... metals, rare minerals, stuff we need for ships or sophisticated instruments... maybe we will never be able to build our own interstellar probes, much less prepare for colony missions to other stars." Jimenez circled back to his chair and sat down. "I need to talk to the president."

***

"This is stupid," Quivey said, watching the big screen at NASA headquarters.

"Don't say that too loudly," Flores, seated next to him, replied.

Quivey scoffed. "I don't care who hears it. I told Jiménez to his face. I told President Durham to her face. I told the talking heads on the news channels. I'll tell anyone, everyone. I'll write a goddamn book."

The image on the screen flickered and rolled, then stabilized. It was a military unit sending the video, but it was a civilian transmission. The whole world was watching.

"Whoever built that probe can manipulate gravity," Quivey said, staring at the screen. "They can cancel it out selectively, use it for cosmic navigation, use it as a power source... and who knows what else? We could learn so much from studying that probe."

"Not if it leaves," Carol said.

"Yes, if it leaves. We can still detect its gravitational emissions if it goes back to the Oort cloud. Imagine monitoring the valuation differentials once it gets back to work. Imagine discerning how it's using gravity and energy and matter as it extracts and refines materials, then packages it up and sends it home. Does it somehow use gravity waves to push the payloads it prepares? What sorts of speeds can those payloads achieve? We need to dedicate a space telescope and a couple of satellites to watching it. We need to repurpose the Distant Worlds Surveyor mission to follow the object back to the Oort Cloud and watch it close up as it works."

"Or," Flores said, "you need to finish your data analyses and write a book on your findings. Maybe we can be the ones canceling gravity. Once we figure out how it's done, we can eliminate the need for rocket engines to get payloads into space."

Quivey shook his head. "It's more than that," he said. "Destroying the object wastes a unique opportunity. And it'll send a message. The wrong message."

"To whom? The aliens?"

"Well, yeah. We could have said, 'Welcome, stranger. Come and rest for a while. We'll share the water ice from our comets and the rare minerals from our asteroids with you. We figure you didn't anticipate making new friends, but here we are!' And instead, we're sending the message, 'Hands off! We're greedy and territorial, and what's more, we'll destroy your property if it strays into our space.' That's not hospitality, is it? That's... I mean, that's hostility. And what if they think the same way Jiménez thinks? They'll say to themselves, 'This race is aggressive. They make war for no god reason. Maybe we should wipe them out before they take to the stars and really make trouble.' We could be making friends, but no. Here we are again, using what resources and opportunities we have to pursue violence, acting out of fear."

Flores put a hand on his arm. "Put that in your book, too. Maybe we can learn a lesson."

A white burst of light filled the great screen as the missile from a drone struck the object. Green and orange flames rolled briefly, then darkened into billows of black smoke.

The object was gone. Twisted wreckage littered the ground. Soon, military trucks would close in and gather up the pieces.

"What are we ever going to learn by analyzing that junk?" Quivey sighed. "We'll get some insights into what the object was made from, but not how it operated."

"How can you be so sure?" Flores asked him.

"Because when you're working with gravity, there's more to it than just gears and levers. The aliens were working with the strangest fundamental force in the universe, unlike any of the others. The technology used to manipulate gravity must also have been unique. It was more than just clockwork that we can try to piece back together."

Flores patted him on the arm again and got up to leave.

Quivey stayed put, angry and rueful.

Friendship is a kind of gravity, he thought. And enmity its opposite. The one could have brought us together with some unimaginable, distant form of life, an intelligence maybe like our own... maybe vastly different. But we won't know now. Or if we do, we'll have gotten off on the wrong foot.

The waste of it, he fumed. The criminal, incompetent mess we've made of an opportunity unlike anything else in our history. Sight unseen, makers of such wonderful technology, strangers that will remain strangers.

Friends we'll never meet.