Harriet walks across the parking lot with her briefcase in one hand, her purse in the other, and a backpack with her laptop on her back. It is well past midnight. The conference ran late, and after a few drinks at the bar with her colleagues, she is thoroughly exhausted. So much so in fact that she begins to hear a phantom voice talking, describing her actions, her good looks, and the fact that as she approaches the car, a man seemingly materializes out of thin air and is now standing before her.
She stops and takes a sharp breath.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the man of twenty-three years of age says. “You’re Dr. Harriet Oppenheimer, right?”
“That’s right,” says Harriet keeping her distance from him.
“My name is…” the man begins as if searching his memory, “Franz… Franz Boas.”
Harriet laughs in spite of herself.
The man continues, “I was at your talk today, We Come in Peace. I’m a big admirer of your work on alien linguistics.”
“What is this about?” she asks the strange fellow. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s been a long day.”
She tries to walk around him but the man blocks her path. She steps back surprised. A knot in her throat.
“You leave me alone, or I’m calling the police!” she says with a rising pitch in her voice.
“I just wanted to show you something-“
She doesn’t wait for him to finish but turns around instead and begins walking the other way.
He runs toward her and grabs her arm.
“I don’t mean to do this,” he says, brandishing a gun, “but I have no other choice. Get in the car.”
She looks at the gun with wide eyes. “You wouldn’t dare!”
Nevertheless, she does as he says and gets in the car.
“Tell it to drive us to Beacon Hill.”
“Please, let me go, I-“ she stutters.
“Be quiet!” he bursts out, “now instruct the car to drive us there.”
She tells her Tesla to drive them to Beacon Hill on the outskirts of the city.
“We Come in Peace,” says the man opening an old Surface laptop with Windows 10 installed. “That was the topic of your talk. The message sent by the aliens and decoded by your linguistic analysis.”
She nods and wipes her tears with a tissue.
“They will arrive in five hundred years according to the results, correct?”
Again she nods looking down at the gun.
The contact with aliens had rocked humanity to its core. They had received the first message thirty years ago as a complex sequence of auditory vibrations in the form of radio waves. Harriet had dedicated her academic career to deciphering this extra-terrestrial language, and the cultural context in which it was produced.
“Your seminal work is on The Genderless Alien- An Analysis of CogBlocks in Trappian Culture.”
Franz displays a diagram from her book that shows the relationship between cognitive blocks- sounds, words, and phrases grouped into cohesive and reproducible linguistic categories as gleaned from the messages sent by the aliens. By means of this analysis, Harriet demonstrated that aliens did not have a word for man, woman, and so forth. They used a single word, nearly unpronounceable by the human vocal apparatus. It was the foundation of their society. For this work, she won the prize, and it formed the basis of the Gender Laws implemented to abolish all gendered terms from languages around the world. After all, if a superior race of beings could get rid of this antiquated concept then why couldn’t humans?
“Except it is wrong,” the man says as if completing a thought.
“What is?”
“Your analysis is wrong, Dr. Oppenheimer.”
Now she truly believes to be in the presence of a madman, and she begins to whimper again.
“Please don’t cry. This will be over soon.”
The Tesla turns down an old logging road and begins its ascent towards Beacon Hill.
Franz presses a few keystrokes on his laptop and brings up an image of a starfield.
“This is the alien planet from which the signals are coming from,” he says. “Unlike Earth, in which carbon dioxide makes up only point zero four percent of the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide in this planet makes up ninety-nine percent of the atmosphere.”
“I don’t see what your point is?” Harriet says finally beginning to calm down.
“Don’t you see? Your analysis treats sound like a homogeneous phenomenon- the same everywhere. On Earth, sound travels at 343 metres per second no matter the frequency, but this is not the case in a carbon rich atmosphere. Carbon dioxide vibrates at a different frequency than oxygen and interacts differently with sound waves depending on their frequencies. Above a certain threshold, high frequency sounds travels faster than low frequency sounds. So…”
“There are two speeds of sound on the alien planet…” she finishes the thought, “…just like Mars.”
“That’s right,” he says, letting out a big sigh of relief. “The aliens modulate their speech patterns based on this differential speed.” He taps on the keyboard and opens a file. “This is what the alien signal sounds to us on Earth.”
She hears the familiar sounds that she had spent countless sleepless hours analyzing. Years of her life!
He opens another clip, “but this is what it truly sounds like when you take the differential speed into account and run it through a 3D aural filter.”
The sound is dampened with a much more complex interaction between low and high frequency sounds.
“This means that they do have a word for different genders,” says Franz. “They just adjust the meaning of the word based on the differential speed of sound.”
Harriet puts one hand over her mouth as she begins to unravel the implications of the results.
“Oh my God, you’re right.”
He smiles and sit backs with a look of relief. He puts the gun on the dashboard as he brings up another diagram.
“There’s more,” he says. “In your presentation, you argued that they don’t have a word for War, presumably they are so advanced they have eliminated it altogether, or perhaps they never had it to begin with. A truly peaceful alien race with no concept of war. Like their message says, they come in peace. That might be true, if the speed of sound was the same at all frequencies like Earth, but when you take into account that there are two speeds of sound in their planet, the opposite is the case.”
They had arrived at Beacon Hill and from the lookout, they could see the stars shimmering above the city.
“They don’t come in peace, Dr. Oppenheimer," Franz says pointing at the sky. "They come to make war. Not in five hundred years, as you postulated, but one hundred.”
She looks at him in stunned silence.
“But why would they warn us ahead of time?” she finally says.
Franz shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. “You’re a member of the ALF committee, you must inform them at once.”
In one swift motion, she reaches for the gun on the dashboard.
“Do you know what this means?” she says, the gun in her hand aimed at him. “My entire career has been based on a false premise. Our gender rules too!”
“Please don’t hurt me,” Franz pleads holding up his hands. “You can take all credit for the discovery. Rules be damned, we can change them if we have to. The important thing is to save humanity.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll be gone by the time they arrive. As far as rules are concerned, I’m sorry to say that there is one rule you cannot change in this story.”
“What’s that?”
“Chekhov’s gun.”
Starfield by @litguru
This story is my entry to the Ink Well Challenge #63. The prompt was frequency with the challenge of tackling the problem of author intrusion as described by @jayna in her article.
In the story, the word frequency is tackled in its scientific sense. Thanks to one the rovers, scientists have found that there are two speeds of sound on Mars because of its carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. At a certain range, high frequency sounds travel faster than low frequency sounds. So, I tried to imagine how this would affect language. The branch of research that deals with the topic of culture and language is called Anthropological linguistics, so the heroine was developed in this vein though it is not overtly stated in the story. Her name Harriet Oppenheimer is a nod to Harriet Ottenheimer who wrote the Anthropology of Language. Oppenheimer is also the last name of a famous figure in the development of life on this planet and serves as a warning to those who think aliens will come in peace. The anti-hero, Franz Boas, is also a reference to the famous anthropologist who popularized cultural relativity.
As far as author intrusion goes, I actively tried to intrude myself into the narrative to see if any readers spot them. So, if you find any author intrusion in this piece, it was put there deliberately, 100%. 😜