By Richard Thieme and Aaron Ximm

[I was whining about rejection slips to my son Aaron Ximm and he came up with this idea. I wrote the story and Analog published it in the Zero Probability category in the October 2006 issue (Vol. CXXVI No. 10) .

This was a poignant moment, first, because Aaron and I had never collaborated before, and second, the first story I ever published, "Pleasant Journey," was published in Analog by the legendary editor John W. Campbell in November 1963. That story was about a virtual reality machine before they existed and a buyer for a carnival who, trying one out, did not ever want to leave. For the full story of that tale and the television program Twilight Zone, see "Talking to Ourselves" in the Islands in the Clickstream Archive (Jan 14 2004).

I was paid $63 for that first story at the age of 19. Imagine my delight when I was paid - you guessed it - exactly $63 for this one too. (I won't bother calculating inflation, it's too depressing.)]

We have been sending signals, one way or another, for centuries, and listening for a reply, thanks to the creaking machinery of that ancient looking-for-a-message-in-a-bottle process we affectionately call SETI.

Never mind that earth cultures long ago abandoned radio waves and adopted lower-register gravity waves for near-instantaneous transmissions to near-star systems.

And never mind that only a few hobbyists know how to build radios.

And never mind that our tidily-wink style of exploring neighboring systems has turned up nothing but rudimentary life forms.

Never mind all that. Religious rituals die hard even in our enlightened times and radio-band SETI searches are definitely a religious ritual. Custodians of the project, spending the accrued interest from an endowment that has grown bloated, are dug in and locked down.

So radio signal sending has continued for centuries because we had the means, the method, and the opportunity.

I don’t think anyone really expected to hear anything back. Even diehard SETIsts greeted the announcement with disbelief. One can announce the second coming only so many times before true believers stop selling their furniture and heading for the hilltops. Yes, maybe the Prophet is right, one learns to say, but … let’s wait and see.

This time, however, it happened. The design of dashes and dots was undeniable. Not in clouds of glory had the extraterrestrial message come but as coherent digital signals enclosed in code wrappers.

Those wrappers were tough to detach. They consisted of braided twists of alien symbols, hundreds of them, interlocking in complex patterns, and it took a massive cracking consortium using Monolith Links in four systems to distinguish the meaningless (to us) hieroglyphics of the alien race from the lucid Chingleese that remained when the wrappers were removed.

The message was distressingly clear.

So we now have a bona fide response to all those messages in all those bottles. But which one did they receive? To which of our many communications do they refer?

Hence this broadcast to all human-cyborg-kind-and-kin in near systems. If any of you has so much as a clue how we might respond, please transmit to Central Station immediately.

The problem is not trivial. Our forebears transmitted millions of ancient and modern messages from “Hello, Rainey,” to weekly installments of WormHole Runners of HyperSpace. We have transmitted on all frequencies, broadcasting in all directions around the spherical bandwidth shell. We have sent the silliest giggles and the most profound insights.

We have sent, alas, everything.

The received message was clearly a response to one of those transmissions. But which one?

WHICH ONE?

We must redress the aliens’ error in judgment. We are a diverse multi-talented species with many variations. We are a bell-curve of modified life-forms, not a simple species that was merely born. Yet we can’t just transmit,

Dear Allegedly Superior Species,
Thank you for your reply. However, to which transmission do you refer?
Perhaps another might be more suitable? Something funnier, perhaps? Or shorter?
Sincerely,
Human-Cyborg-Kind (and kin)

No, that won’t work. It would take forever to get an answer back, if they answer at all. I can imagine the blue-tipped tentacle of some clueless intern wiping out our message, oblivious to the implications.

So SETI may be nothing but a monument to the foolish optimism of human-cyborg-kind. At least the sentient life in our little neighborhood can have a good laugh before shooting itself in its collective head with a gun that flaps BANG! on a drop-stick.

Enough preamble. Here, dear kind and kin, is the unanticipated climax of SETI:

Dear Human-cyborg-kind,

Thank you very much for your transmission. A majority of systems in the universe have now had time to review it and we believe that you show promise. Even the Blander-gsst-thupfft! agreed, and they seldom respond positively to any unsolicited transmission (they stamp “we have heard this before” on every one; given their age, maybe they have.)

While your transmission does suggest a certain quirky creativity, unfortunately you do not meet our current needs. There is, in addition, a backlog of species of your type in the universe, so we will not be reviewing transmissions from your sort for an indefinite period. Please listen to this frequency to learn if this policy changes. Policies are reviewed once every galeemp.

This negative response is in no way a comment on your planetary systems or the life-forms they have produced.

Although we would like to reply to each and every transmission, please understand that with millions of systems broadcasting in thousands of media 4889999955677000-seven, an individual response is impossible.

Perhaps a (very young) parallel universe would find your transmission suitable. I believe the Dirnsa are looking for a pet so you might try the umpteenth bubble in the thirieth froth. If you do transmit to a universe less than six billion years old, however, remember to include return-energy-bands to ensure a response.

Sincerely,

Lem-Lem-Three-bang)!
(designated receiver of unsolicited Flotsam, Jetsam, Detritus and Fluff)
on behalf of HelllenWuline and Associates
(nested at the seventeenth level of the HoHo Reception Group and interim assistant to the seventh sub-Intern’s fourteenth aide)

Some people don’t like the scene in the movie “Contact” in which Jodie Foster as a SETI scientist meets the aliens because we aren’t shown what the aliens look like.

I think that was the right way to do it. We can’t think the unthinkable; from inside the old paradigm, we can’t imagine what the world will look like from inside a new one.

I wish I knew a better term than “paradigm change” to describe our movement through a zone of annihilation — as individuals and as cultures — in order to experience genuine transformation. But I don’t. We have to let go of the old way of framing reality in order for a new one to emerge.

The infusion of the contact scenario with religious awe also makes sense. After contact, our place in the scheme of things will shift. The things we believe now that we still believe will be understood in a new way.

Once we saw earthrise from the moon, our understanding of ourselves and our planet changed forever.
Asked how people go bankrupt, Hemingway said, “Two ways: gradually, then suddenly.”
That’s exactly how transformation happens.

Last week I spoke for the Professional Usability Association in Monterey, California. Usability professionals work the human side of computer use. They begin with human beings — how we behave, how we construct reality — and build back through an interface, a kind of symbolic Big Toy, until the last module plugs into the computer so seamlessly that users don’t even notice. When the human/computer interface is bone-in-the-socket solid, it’s like putting in your contact lenses, then forgetting that you’re wearing them.

Usability professionals deepen the symbiotic relationship between networked computers (symbol-manipulating machines) and networked humans (symbol-manipulating machines). We rise together up a spiral of mutual transformation, programming each other as we climb.

The global computer network is teaching us to speak its language. All those courses in using new applications, programming, system and web site administration are invitations from the Network to learn to play its way.

What will it look like when we emerge in a clearing and take stock of our newly emergent selves? Neither humans nor computers can predict how the fully evolved human/computer synthesis will think about itself. Still, imagining what it might be like makes us more ready to have the experience when it arrives.

Thinking about the unthinkable ripens the mind toward new possibilities.

Janice Rohn, President of the Usability Professionals Association, manages Sun Microsystem’s Usability Labs and Services. Before her career evolved in that direction, she was fascinated by dolphins and the challenge of communicating with them.

Swimming with dolphins was a remarkable experience, she said, because you could feel their sonar “scanning” you.

What do we look like to dolphins?

“Densities,” she imagined. “A pattern of densities.”

Rohn realized that her youthful dream of human-dolphin communication was unlikely to be realized soon and moved toward a different kind of alien encounter, enhancing the human/computer interface.

I never swam with dolphins but I did dive with whales. Down on the west Maui reef in thirty or forty feet of water, I would suddenly hear the haunting songs of humpbacks. Turning rapidly in the water, peering in vain toward the deepening curtains of blue light toward the open water, I became part of the music as vibrations played over my body like a drum skin. I understood why sailors died to hear the sirens’ songs. I didn’t want to surface. It was magical, being an instrument in the orchestra of another species.

Which one of us was singing?

Some years ago, I wrote a science fiction story called “The Bridge.” The hero was selected by aliens through a series of tests to be the first earthling to come into their presence. His body had been crippled by illness; living in pain had taught him to see through the outward appearance of others and connect with the real person.

The aliens, it turned out, were hideous, and knew their appearance demanded a capacity for compassion that was rare and heroic. My hero had that. He connected with the alien beings at the level of their shared heritage as evolved and conscious creatures.
The story concluded:

“He loves to look at the bright stars in the desert sky and imagine memories of other worlds. His dreams are alive with creatures with silvery wings hovering over oceans aglow with iridescent scales; with the heads of dragons, fire-breathing; and with gargoyles and angels, their glass skins the colors of amethysts, sapphires, and rubies. Only Victor knows if he is remembering what the aliens said or just dreaming. The rest of us must wait for the days that will certainly come when the bridge he built and became is crossed in all directions by myriads of beings of a thousand shapes and hues, streaming in the light of setting suns.”

Genuine encounters with the Other, with others, and with other species — dolphins, whales, extraterrestrials — breaks naturally into mystical and religious experience because our models of reality are expanded beyond their limits. The paradigm snaps, we pass through a zone of annihilation in which everything we believed ourselves to be is called into question. Then we coalesce around a new center at a higher level of complexity that includes and transcends everything that came before.

The full evolution of a human/computer synthesis is likely to be a religious experience too. It will happen gradually, then suddenly.

Usability professionals come to their tasks in the belief that they are working with people, making technology more user-friendly. In fact, they are working at the same time on behalf of the Computer, making human beings more computer-friendly. The process always changes those who participate in it, even when they maintain an illusion of control.

We are all in collusion with the Network, just as auto owners want the world reconfigured to be approachable by roads. But the roads of the Net go inward, into inner space, and map the territory of our evolving hive mind. Gradually, then suddenly, we will create digital constructs that disclose new possibilities for losing ourselves in electronic music. We will feel the magic of the web play over our bodies, redefine our relationship to ourselves and to one another. A pattern of densities seen by an alien brain, a synthesis, bone-in-the-socket solid, the singer and the song.