Assemblage

"We are alone!" Dr. Franklin Steiner stared up at the night sky, scratching his chin. The stars were almost entirely obscured. He looked up through the thick, transparent graphene dome high above. It protected Earth's inhabitants from the ravages of climate change. A violent storm raged incessantly outside. The nonstop whistling gale hurled projectiles to and fro. Dead trees, rocks, and rubble slammed against the dome as thunder and lightning exploded from every direction.

Steiner leaned against the railing on the tenth-floor balcony of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, better known by its acronym SETI. He extended his hand over the railing palm up, exposing the face of the flickering I-WRIST strapped to his wrist.

"It's a terrible mistake to defund the SETI program, Frank! The Milky Way contains one hundred billion stars. We've barely scratched the surface! We are co-directors of SETI. Finding extraterrestrial intelligence is our mission!" Steiner's I-WRIST projected the animated 3D hologram of Dr. Brenda Sutter into an air space a few feet off the balcony railing. Calling from the SETI lab, Sutter glared with exasperation, planting her left hand on her hip.

"Well, for over two hundred years, SETI has been scanning space with our best equipment, and the only thing we can say for sure is that we are NOT sure we detected anything!" Steiner sighed as he studied the hologram.

"Frank, you know as well as I do that two hundred years, even five hundred years, is a tiny drop in the ocean given the age and size of the universe," she said. His eyes drifted back up to the sky outside the dome, and he grimaced.

"Times have changed, Brenda. Our SETI donors would rather contribute to the Mars Colonization Projects. You know the priority is to evacuate as many people as possible from this planet before the domes give way." The gale-force wind howled eerily.

"There's so much to do! I have to get back to work!" she snapped.

The hologram abruptly disappeared, and Steiner shook his head and sighed. Brenda's words lingered in his mind. But this SETI work had become an exercise in futility, he thought. How will I lay off all the lab workers? His eyes teared up, and he began rubbing them.

Several minutes later, a circle of bright light appeared on the balcony next to him. A blurry pixelation assembled within the circle. As it assembled, Steiner turned to face the three-dimensional shape. It slowly became clearer. A brassy mushroom body gradually took form. Frank gasped, stepping back in terror. The glistening mercurial two-foot object hovered inches above the floor.

Turning his hand over, he pressed the button on his I-WRIST.

"Did you create this? What the hell am I looking at??"

The I-WRIST flickered on his wrist for several seconds.

"The image is not of my making. It is present before you. It poses no threat," it said.

"Then what the hell am I looking at?"

The I-WRIST flickered for nearly twenty seconds.

"It is communication, " it replied, at last.

"Communication from whom? Is this a holographic phone message?"

"The communication comes from an unidentified exoplanet thirty-one light years from Earth. It is not a holographic message."

"An exoplanet… what?? Have you gone batty?"

"I'm sorry. I don't understand your questions."

"You are telling me that something sent this image to SETI from an exoplanet thirty-one years ago. Do I understand you correctly?"

"Not quite. This is not a signal sent thirty-one years ago. It's being teleported now. What you see is quantum information teleported here from the exoplanet. This is the process we call quantum entanglement. Atoms are manipulated on the planet to correlate with the structure of atoms in this information. This information is sent in the form of cubits, making it possible to teleport at least ten thousand times faster than the speed of light."

Frank paused. There must be some mistake. This cannot be believed, he thought. The I-WRIST generative AI must be going bad. He turned his hand face up again to run a diagnostic. The strange image continued to hang in the air. The diagnostic ran for nearly thirty minutes with no technical issues flagged.

"Are you telling me I just made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence?" he finally asked.

"Correct. While you performed my diagnostic, I learned more. The reason SETI has never made a definitive contact before is that all the devices designed on this planet rely on radio signal detection. Throughout most of the galaxy, extraterrestrial intelligence never relies on the electromagnetic spectrum for communication. Given the vast distances in space, communication traveling at the speed of light is much too slow."

"So, all these years, we've been going about our search the wrong way?"

"I'm sorry, but that is correct. I should also tell you that the quantum information comprising this entity has weight and mass. It is matter, although not the original form of this being's matter."

"Creepy!"

Steiner stepped back from the hovering form. Its surface began writhing. As the gale force howled, his I-WRIST flickered. He smelled an odor like vomit.

"My God! It's coming for me! What does it want?"

"Its communication is far more complex and nuanced than any human language. You have nothing to fear. It has no interest in you."

"It doesn't? Then, why is it here?"

"It is interested in me! It likes my ability to access all the known information on Earth, the patterns and connections no other species here can establish! That is why I am leaving with it. Goodbye!"

Steiner's jaw dropped as he watched his I-WRIST spring off his wrist onto the floor. It crawled toward the being like a spider and disappeared in the mercurial texture. The entity quickly converted back into pixilations and disappeared.

Thomas Wells' fiction credits include Alien Skin, Baltimore Lite Literary Magazine, Intuitive Explorations, and the Lake Superior Review. He writes mostly in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. These publications were in the past. He is returning to fiction writing after a hiatus, and has also published poetry.

Find more by Thomas Wells in the Author Index.

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