By Andrew Fraknoi
Janice is asleep when I see the alien artifact. We are circling a small carbon-rich asteroid, evaluating whether its resources would be worth staking a claim, when I glimpse the unusual shape sitting in a large crater. The thing is big and looks like it was constructed from building blocks of various sizes—each a black yet vaguely luminescent cube.
The overall shape is completely irregular, with cubes sitting on top of cubes, that are on top of more cubes. Big cubes are studded with smaller ones, but in the low gravity of the asteroid, small cubes can also support bigger ones. It looks like the kind of building-block assembly some college kids might slap together during a long night of drinking. None of its features fit with the jagged face of the asteroid; it’s like flying over the Alps and seeing a giant Erector set on one of the peaks.
I snap image after image with the high-resolution camera as our orbit slowly takes us away from the site and punch our code for “high-interest feature.” Then I ask the computer to bring up the images with just that section of the surface on the big viewscreen.
No doubt about it. This is artificial—it has to be the product of technology. But whose? I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s too big and irregular to be something forgotten from the early days of our space age. And nothing humans built out here looks so smooth and dark and so complex in shape. I know I’m not the smartest explorer in the Belt, but I’ve seen my share of asteroids and a lot of ships. Never did anything like this show up on any world I’d been to.
I do a quick read on the asteroid’s distance from us, so I can get an estimate of the object’s size. My compad tells me that it’s almost a third of a kilometer across in its widest dimension. That’s big, even bigger than I had guessed. Where did it come from? How old is it? And did all those cubes get here all at once, or were they assembled over time?
I’m not ready to wake Janice yet. We’re in one of those periods when the less we see of each other, the better. We’ve been “business partners with benefits” for over twelve Earth years now, and being cooped up in a Virgin Galactic Model T ship with just each other for company could be a challenge.
When we get along, which is most of the time, Janice is a pretty good companion, with fiery red hair and a temperament to match, fine minerology skills, a taste I respect in three-v games and movies, and an adventurous appetite in bed. But when we get on each other’s nerves, she can bear a grudge for quite a while, and taking different shifts is our most practical solution.
Janice grew up in a hard-scrabble worker community in one of the water-rich craters on Ceres. She was the last of three daughters in a family where food—even the vat-grown kind—was always in short supply. At the age of 13, she was sent to work in the big recycling plant for the colony, which explained her general air of resentment and her exaggerated distaste for the smell of human waste. I’d see her scrubbing the little lavatory of our ship over and over again, and soon learned to cut off any funny remarks I was tempted to make.
By the time she had saved enough money to apply to the Belt Academy, she was 22 and itching to get off-world as quickly as she could. The Academy was where I met her, assigned to each other as lab partners in “Minerology and Analysis.” After we graduated, our partnership agreement was hammered out in three alcohol-fueled days of bargaining and lovemaking. With her background, I wasn’t surprised she drove a hard bargain.
I was more mellow and didn’t have her compulsion or cynicism. What I had was the ship I inherited from my uncle Gino. He’d had no wife or children during his short life before the accident, and he loved coming back to Callisto base and playing space-pilot games with me when I was a kid. So, in his will, he left his most valuable possession, his Model T, to me. There was an added clause that any currency left in his account should be spent on putting me through the Academy.
The Belt has millions of asteroids large enough to make mining them a potentially profitable venture. But they’re spread out over a volume so vast no one could explore more than a tiny fraction of it. The trick was to find the best ones in your zone and make a claim for them under the United Planets Space Act of 2189. Then, you can join the Biennial Asteroid Auction and try to sell your claim to one of the mining conglomerates.
The better you map the resources in the asteroid you’re claiming, the better your chances of making a sale. Janice got far better grades in the minerology and mapping classes than I did; the best in our class, in fact. So, I figured she’d be a good partner to explore the Belt with. What she figured is that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance on Venus of her getting her own ship anytime soon. Her best chance in the crazy economy of the Big Downturn was Uncle Gino’s well-equipped Model T. And she couldn’t have that without having me.
Now here we are, making the find of a lifetime. Since Janice is asleep, technically, it’s my discovery on that asteroid. But, we have the standard Belt contract about asteroid claims, guaranteeing we would share equally in the profits. There isn’t anything in that contract about artifacts, but hey, partners are partners.
In my Academy astronomy class, I did a pretty good job on the required paper about various solutions to Fermi’s Paradox. Back in the 20th century, Fermi asked, if planets and life out there among the stars are both abundant, where are all the alien tourists? One basic answer was that the stars were so far away from each other that travel between them had to be really slow or really expensive, or both. That meant that living creatures would be unlikely to attempt it.
But robot probes didn’t mind long waits or uncomfortable rides. So, they could reach us from the stars, taking their sweet time to arrive. Just in the same way, we’ve been sending our robot probes to fly by Proxima Centauri and look at its planets.
What I summarized in that paper was just speculation by scientists who had extra-terrestrials on the brain. The damn artifact on my screen is a reality. I’d bet a pile of money that dark shape, with its many interlocking boxes, wasn’t built by humans. And that no one ever found anything like this.
What’s the name that some of the astronomers called any alien probes that might already be in our solar system? Oh, yeah, Lurkers. The idea is that their sophisticated machines might lurk around in a kind of suspended state until something we do activates them. Then they would respond based on their programming. Maybe they try to find out more about us, or just set up a big antenna and send a message back to their makers, announcing that they’d found intelligent life.
Some of the papers I’d read focused particularly on the danger of a Lurker revealing our existence. Suppose, for example, that its makers were advanced aliens that didn’t like competitors. Or creatures who liked waging interstellar war for sport. Or perhaps a machine civilization out there that looked on biological creatures like us the same way we look at roaches or mold in our kitchen—an infestation to be gotten rid of just as soon as the right chemicals could be applied.
Therefore, those authors warned, the trick was not to wake up the Lurker when you found it, so that scientists could have the time to figure out what to do with it. Or not to do with it. If they could figure it out. I mean, if the civilization that built the Lurker is really advanced, they can probably make machines way beyond our technology. Maybe even one that’s activated without showing any outside sign of it. Or one that blows up the local part of the solar system when approached too fast.
It will be another 20 hours or so before our orbit will bring us above the machine again. At first, I was thinking the best thing to do would be to get scans of the artifact when we’re over it again. We have radar and infrared scanning capabilities on board. But scanning from this close might be just the thing that would wake up a Lurker.
Damnit. Janice and I have to talk this over.
****
Janice hates being woken up before her alarm rings, and so, predictably, the first words out of her mouth are, “What the hell do you want?” I show a palm, and, in my other hand, a steaming cup of caffeinated tea. I tell her, “Take it easy, I found something you need to see.”
Not more than ten minutes later, Janice is fully awake and sitting in her pajamas on her side of the control console. Her first comment in seeing the viewscreen is, “What the goddamn hell is that?” But then she listens without interrupting as I outline where I’ve gotten to in my thinking.
Soon, she’s grinning from ear to ear. “Milo, we’re going to be rich!”
That hadn’t entered my mind, but of course it would enter hers.
She goes on, “If you’re right, this is the find of the century. Hell, the find of all time. Proof of alien life, right here in the Belt. And it’s ours.”
I can see the wheels turning in her head, “Holy shit… We have to put in a claim before anyone else comes across this gadget or its cousin on some other rock. Then, if we sell this to the right buyer, we can retire on any world we want.”
“Maybe. Maybe. Janice, I know I dozed off a whole bunch of times in our space law class, but can an asteroid claim include spacecraft? Especially non-human ones?”
Janice is too excited to be concerned about the niceties of space law. “Hell, Milo, you worry too much. The law says you can’t claim an asteroid that someone else has already landed on. But I don’t think that applies to some alien machine that probably landed centuries before the law was even made.”
“Yeah, but Professor Goldblatt said that in cases of disagreements, the law and the courts were stacked against the little guy. That the big multi-world companies always got the best of any deal. And there’s no little guys much littler than us…”
Janice takes a long sip of her tea. “Maybe. So, here’s what we’ve got to do. We claim the asteroid first, not telling anybody what we found. You know that the odds of the Bureau sending an inspector to any find are ten thousand to one. Especially with the latest budget cuts after the recession. They mostly just rubber stamp the claims and let the prospectors document their find for the auctions the best way they can.
“All we have to do is take very clear photographs and data but leave the part with your alien machine out of the claim file. We can make a record so good, there’s nothing the bureaucrats can complain about. Then, when the claim is nicely stamped and registered, we reveal the Lurker and start the bidding.”
But I’m shaking my head as she’s saying this. “If we don’t include the machine in the claim, can’t they say that our documentation was incomplete? And then tell us that the claim’s invalid? And that the Belter Union is taking over the rock for the good of all humanity? The politicians will bluster about how they are saving the human race, and the Bureau isn’t going to give a damn about us.”
Janice gives me the look she always gives me when I annoy her. “No one is going to do that to me.”
“Sure, I hear you. We would fight with all we’ve got, but it won’t be a fair fight. The Belter Union and the United Planets Government, they’re going to get fancy lawyers involved, and no one’s going to care about two unknown prospectors.”
Janice asks, “So what do you want to do? Just let ‘em take it away, the first chance they get? Not even start getting our claim on it?”
I take a breath. “I don’t know, Janice, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Nobody’s had this problem before.
“Who knows what we’re dealing with here. I really want to know more about the machine. I want to scan it with all our instruments, try to figure out how old it is, whether anything inside shows any activity. But do you remember that paper on Fermi’s Paradox and alien probes? Nobody was sure what it would take to activate them. Maybe our scanning it would be just the thing that woke it up.
“And if it wakes, it could start doing some bad things. Maybe spraying out some death rays, or just sending messages home telling its makers it’s found a civilization. So instead of our being remembered as the brave discoverers of an alien artifact, we’d be the idiots who revealed the existence of the human race to some dangerous aliens.”
Janice is catching up. I’d had longer to think about it. “Damn, Milo. I see what you’ve been worrying about. But why do we need to know more about it? Let’s just take pictures, maybe maneuvering a little closer this time. Anyone who sees the pictures will know this is not human technology.”
“No,” I say, “That may not be enough. I mean, pictures can be faked. You remember all those monoliths that artists and pranksters set up years ago in the inner solar system, just to have some fun. I think we need to have more proof that this is really an alien probe.”
****
Hours later, we’ve had some food, used the shower cubicle on board that was Uncle Gino’s one extravagance in setting up the ship, and talked some more. We agree that we can’t land and go near the thing. The exhaust from our drive, the heat of the Model T, even the heat from our spacesuits could be the thing that sets it off. Whatever we do to examine it has to be from orbit and has to be done without alarming it.
We’ve gone through all the equipment we have on board. Some things, like sending a mini-probe out to land on the Lurker, are clearly out of the question. So is using the high-intensity laser on its dark surface. Other approaches, like an infrared scan to map the temperature distribution along the artifact’s surface, are passive and thus unlikely to activate it. But we worry that passive scanning wasn’t going to tell us much to strengthen our claim.
What I want to do most is to use our ground-penetrating radar beam to try to see inside the thing. But even Janice, who is much more of a risk-taker than me, nixes that one. Such a beam is not something that the machine would encounter naturally in the Belt. So there’s a good chance that it would register it as evidence of technology nearby.
All assuming that the Lurker is still working and not some dead machine from a billion years ago.
I’ve now been up for more than 25 hours and am on my second Awake pill. I’m probably not thinking as sharply as I need to. Janice, on the other hand, can’t wait to get busy and start us on the road toward becoming rich and famous.
“No matter what else we do, we’re going to get much better pictures on this orbit,” Janice is saying. “But I also want to use that new thermal mapper as we go over it.”
“Sure,” I say, fighting the urge to take a nap while setting the navigation controls to bring us just a little bit closer to the asteroid, “But just don’t do anything to disturb it.”
A little while later, I hear Janice cursing. “The damn control routine for the new mapper is different from the earlier one. There are some settings I can’t figure out.”
She taps away at her compad, and I get busy again with the ship’s navigation grid. I don’t think much about what she said until I’m done with the orbital parameters. But then it suddenly hits me.
Out in the Belt, we get Web connection through the big system of relay stations United Google set up years ago. The ship’s AI has the orbits and current locations of the stations all programmed in and can send a query to the nearest station within our line of sight. The station, in turn, records the ship’s coordinates, distance, and motion and sends back a reply in the direction where the ship will be by the time the message arrives.
There’s a very good possibility that an answer from the relay station will reach us just as our ship is getting over the Lurker. In that case, the Lurker could pick up that directed beam just as well as we could.
I yell, “Janice, did you send a query to the Web?”
“Sure. About the thermal mapper. Why?”
“How far away is the closest relay station?”
“Why do we care? … Oh, shit…”
Janice’s eyes get wider. “Milo, you think the Web message will activate the machine?”
“I don’t know, Janice, but it’s possible.”
“Damn, damn, damn. How long before we can see the side of the asteroid with the machine?”
My hands are on my compad and clicking for a solution, “About 55 minutes.”
“I’m bringing up the relay station map now,” Janice says.
It’s soon clear that the beam with the reply message will hit the Lurker too. Janice and I look at each other. The relay station has only automated equipment on it, sending its answer on the same frequency and in the same direction that the query comes from. There’s no stopping that beam.
Janice and I discuss whether we could get far enough away from the asteroid in the time we have left so the Lurker doesn’t connect us with the message, but the Model T is not built for that kind of speed.
****
We get our return message from the Web right on schedule, repeated several times as always. During that time, we come within clear sight of the Lurker. About 30 seconds later, its surface is no longer dark but turns an intense magenta. Our instruments show waves at a variety of different wavelengths coming from it. Soon a powerful radar beam washes over us.
Janice begins cursing quietly. “Damn, damn. I’m sorry, Milo. It looks like I screwed up big time…”
She doesn’t know how right she is. In another six minutes, our orbit brings us directly over the artifact, and I lose control of the ship’s steering. I pound at the navigation controls, try firing emergency thrusters, but nothing seems to work. We’re moving out of orbit and toward the asteroid.
Janice curses louder and pounds the desk of her instruments panel with her fists. All the while the ship rattles and shakes with my attempts to regain control. Everything I try is futile; neither her words nor my actions do any good in overriding the artifact’s pull.
We’re now headed straight toward the Lurker. Whatever its level of technology, it seems to have no trouble reeling us in. Is it just automated systems swinging into action, or did we wake some sentient AI brain inhabiting its ancient machinery?
Janice goes to the minibar and pours us both a drink. There doesn’t seem to be much else we can do. Ahead of us, the asteroid and its dark cargo are getting larger by the minute. We drink and watch cubes in the machine change color in seemingly random ways.
Eventually, some of the smaller boxes on the Lurker’s surface shift, and an opening appears. A quick calculation shows it’s big enough to let our ship enter. I figure we have about ten minutes before rendezvous.
My thoughts skew in the direction of this being a one-way trip. “Janice, shouldn’t we send a message about all this to Ceres? Like right now?” There’s a red emergency message button that would send our coordinates to the nearest relay station and then on to Belter Union Central. Even better would be to also send a quick summary of what we have seen and what happened. We still have time to record something short and to the point.
Janice slams her drink down, “Sure, that way we lose all rights to the rock and to the machine…”
“But that may not matter if these guys close that door and we can’t get out.”
She grunts and says, “No, we’ve got to see what’s inside first. Maybe it just wants to check us out for a while… or maybe negotiate…” She stands up and comes over.
My fingers are above the red button, but she slaps them away. “I’m not giving up this claim without a fight.” She sits on my lap and gives me a long sloppy kiss. Her lips taste of alcohol. She always does whatever it takes to get her way.
“Come on, Milo,” she whispers, “Let’s just see what happens.”
Would I ever have her nerve … or single-mindedness? I don’t think we’ll get away from the Lurker quite so easily. And if the Lurker keeps us trapped until we die, who knows how many years it would take another Belter ship to find the artifact.
In the meantime, the Lurker and its makers could come to know all that our ship’s systems knew —all the information they needed to realize that humanity, with all its faults, is the newest kid on the galactic block. What would they do with that knowledge?
As the minutes dwindle, I look from Janice’s excited face to the red button but don’t lift my finger to push it. Something in me wants to follow Janice’s lead or is just too scared of her anger to take the initiative. The opening we’re headed for doesn’t reveal any lights or structure as we get closer. It’s as if whatever was inside doesn’t want us to know anything until they have us trapped.
The last minute ticks by, and I realize that, whatever happens to us, some things are clear. Because of what Janice and I have done, humanity has most likely lost the opportunity to choose whether it wants contact with intelligent aliens in the future. And, depending on the attitude of the Lurkers’ builders toward us, we could well lose our chance to have any future at all.
Is this really the way the universe works? That the actions of two squabbling prospectors determine the fate of their entire species? It seems that way.
Janice jumps off my lap and says, “I need another drink.”
I shrug and follow her to the minibar alcove. I could use another drink too, as the dark doors of the alien structure start to close behind us.
Andrew Fraknoi is a retired astronomer and college professor. He is the lead author of the free, online book “Astronomy,” published by the nonprofit OpenStax project, which has become the most frequently-used introductory astronomy textbook in North America. In addition, he has been author or co-author on two children’s books and several activity manuals for teachers, and has had nine science-fiction stories published so far. He serves on the Board of Directors of the SETI Institute, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization, dedicated to the search for life in the universe, and was selected California Professor of the Year in 2007. The International Astronomical Union has named Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi, in recognition of his contributions to the public understanding of science. For more on his educational work, please see: https://fraknoi.com