Beneath
Part 1: The Signal
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I know we have a lack of seating. If you can’t find a space to stand the lecture is being livefed into several other lecture halls in the Harriman building, as well as online.”
Professor Timothy Merriman worked hard to keep his voice calm. It was a herculean struggle. Like everyone, he was profoundly afraid.
“It’s been about 72 hours since the original…” he cleared his throat, “…transmission and the staff here in the linguistics department, in conjunction with dozens of other institutions globally, felt it was important to update the scientific community…the entire world I suppose…on what we now know.”
Professor Merriman was sweating. He thought he was modulating his voice well enough to eliminate the sound of fear – speech, after all, was his fortè – but his hands just wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Before we go into the new information, let’s go over what’s already happened for those of you who’ve been living in a cave.” The joke went unnoticed and the professor turned around to face a small table upon which a light piece of linen was covering a 12 inch tall cylinder. With a small tug he uncovered the low end model universal home assistant. It was a budget version, second generation technology at best.
“I’m sure for many of us, myself included, you first heard it over one of these.” Professor Merriman gestured to the simple white cylinder which, until a few days ago, he’d thought of only as often as he needed to order more breakfast cereal or toilet paper. Today, alone on the small table, all white plastic with a single, blue LED circle, it seemed to wait in ominous silence.
“The transmission was broadcast at 11:24PM Eastern Standard time, that’s 2324 for our global audience. The content of the transmission – we will refer to it as ‘S1’ – was…unorthodox. To the average listener it was likely rather cryptic – however to linguistic specialists like myself…” Merriman considered his next words carefully and decided on honesty, “…well it scared me shitless.” The Dean wouldn’t like that – but the hell with him.
With an audible click Merriman depressed the play button of a pre-set analog recorder. Inside its plastic sheath the black magnetic tape of a casette was pulled through spindles, its unnerving contents played aloud from a tinny speaker.
A voice, of sorts, rumbled the same sounds in a repetitive pattern. The speaker did not sound human, or even organic. It was as though the notes of a bass guitar were being manipulated into lingual sounds.
Saolamagəhnūanshəra. Saolamagəhnūanshəra. Saolam…
The original transmission had repeated itself exactly 500 times. Merriman allowed the recording to loop twice before he jerked forward with a trembling hand to shut it off. He’d intended to allow it to play five times, but visceral fear intervened.
The room filled with absolute silence. Pale faces sought guidance. Merriman, their ostensible sage, briefly wished he’d become a garbage man instead of a linguist.
“So. That happened. Most of you will have heard the original, as it saturated every radio frequency on the planet for nearly an hour. There has not yet been another…” what should he call it, a message? “…abnormal broadcast since.”
A man standing in the back of the lecture hall raised his hand high and Merriman looked up at him. “We’ll be taking questions at the end of the presentation.”
But the man blurted out his question before Merriman finished his sentence. “Where is it coming from?!” The man’s voice bore a high pitched overtone of fear, and hearing it triggered something in the audience. The questions came all at once and crescendoed, threatening to devolve into riotous chaos.
“Who’s speaking? What does it mean? Where did it come from? What should we do? What is the government doing?”
Merriman could see things getting out of control. A single security guard stood impotently at the foot of the right stairs, arms outstretched, his face near panic.
With a flick of a switch Merriman turned on the speaker system in the lecture hall and twisted a dial to maximum volume. Then he forced his voice to take on the modulation of command and spoke. “Everyone stop!”
His stern order reverberated through the room, the sound so loud it broke up around the edges. The crowd went silent and looked down at him.
“Sit down and remain calm!” The audience obeyed and Merriman lowered the volume. But not by a lot. “I will answer the questions we all have as best as I’m able.”
Merriman tried to settle back into the original presentation. As he moved from topic to topic he displayed a different slide.
“Our information is limited, but we are learning. First, we don’t know who sent this message. However, we do have a general idea of its originating location.”
A slide was displayed showing the Earth as a circle with several lines drawn straight through sixteen points on its surface. All the lines intersected at a single point near the center of the planet.
“The original message was broadcast simultaneously across the surface of the Earth. The simultaneity of the transmission has been confirmed by comparing hundreds of geographical locations. The signal was initially hypothesized to be originating off planet, however the precise simultaneity of the event, at the same signal strength, supports a more… irregular hypothesis. Incorporating efforts at signal triangulation, we currently believe the signal originated from inside the Earth itself.“
This information was received with audible gasps. At least a few people seemed to faint. Merriman couldn’t blame them. He’d nearly fainted as well when he saw the data.
He continued before the crowd devolved into panic again. The slide changed to an EM wave map of the original signal. “Machine learning is analyzing the message’s raw electronic data, but so far no patterns beyond the auditory information have been found.”
The slide changed again. Merriman urged himself forward, passing along the information with the urgency of a man on fire. The slide displayed 8 phonetic syllables.
“By far the most fruitful analysis has been linguistic up to this point. Although the…” Merriman hesitated automatically, “…speaker is difficult to understand, our analysis has a identified 8 distinct syllables.”
Sao
La
Ma
Gəh
Nū
Ahn
Shə
Rah
“They’re displayed here in simplified phonetics. For the non-linguist crowd, the upside-down “e” is a shwa, it sounds like “uh.” The “u” with a line over it is liquid, as in Pew or New.”
“Obviously,” or perhaps, Merriman thought, it was not so obvious, “we cannot assume the speaker is human. However, using these syllables as a base line, algorithmic searches isolated 36 possible human languages. Specialists were contacted for each.”
Merriman changed the slide to a blank and added information with the press of a button. “I have to thank Professor Abdul Mahman at the University of Cairo for his invaluable assistance. Professor Mahman is a specialist in Eqyptian historical linguistics, and a fluent speaker of Coptic.”
A button press revealed a list of nearly 40 syllables. “Coptic is an endangered language. It’s a derivation of the extinct spoken language of ancient Egypt, Demotic Egyptian. Yet, as you can see,” another click and 6 of the syllables were highlighted, “there is a substantial overlap in phonetic sounds between S1 and the Coptic spoken language.”
The ramifications of all this information cast a spell on the crowd, all of whom were silent and listened as though in a dream. Merriman continued. “Professor Mahman is the foremost authority in Demotic Egyptian, and is one of the few able to speak a rudimentary form aloud. The phonetics of S1 match even more closely the sounds available to the Demotic Egyptian speaker.” The slide displayed a different set of syllables with all eight of the S1 sounds accounted for.
Professor Merriman could hardly remain standing. The final revelation he had to share still struck at his core. There would be no hiding it, the internet was already awash in rumors, both true and fabricated. But as he prepared to share his knowledge, Merriman became acutely aware of his momentous, terrifying place in human history. The audience sensed the magnitude of the announcement and sat, rapt.
“Professor Mahman derived an initial translation of S1 using an amalgam of known Coptic and Hypothesized Demotic Egyptian lingual patterns and vocabulary. The precise tense and perspective is not clear. But, we are fairly certain about the meaning of what we believe to be the three words spoken in S1. They are…”
Merriman tried to make himself say it. He tried to articulate the pronouncement broadcast to the entire world at once from the center of the Earth by forces or entities unknowable and beyond comprehension.
But the words just wouldn’t come. Instead he pressed the button and the final slide was displayed.
OUR/YOUR
CREATOR
APPROACHES
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