Location: Central control room of the Alma 3 project
Time: +01.01.01 from the initial date, 07:14 UTC?4
Setting: End of the surveillance shift
My shift was supposed to end at eight, yet time seemed to crawl unbearably slow. I still had nearly an hour to go, but I was on the brink of nodding off. I must have been dreaming—or half dreaming—when a sound sharper than the usual background hum caught my attention: a ticking, like the keystrokes of an old typewriter.
But the sound did not come from a typewriter. It came from the quantum computer.
I stepped closer to the screen; it was all black, except for a stripe of numbers appearing as if typed directly by the system. What struck me was the beauty of the numbers. They were sequences of 0s and 1s, clearly binary, but that wasn’t the source of my astonishment. It was the purity of their form. These characters looked as if they had come from an ancient civilization, shaped by rules both aesthetic and mathematical.
The series expanded until it filled the whole screen. The numbers aligned in rows, then another row appeared—turquoise in color, sometimes shading toward green, sometimes toward azure, like moving seawater. The sequence never changed: twenty numbers, always the same, in binary notation. When the sequence ended, it paused briefly, only to restart from the beginning.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
The message’s simplicity was also its mystery. It was too short to be a code, without any apparent meaning. Before calling anyone, I hesitated, thinking. For the first time in history, ALMA 3 had captured an alien signal, coming from the depths of the universe. No, that couldn’t be. Perhaps it wasn’t alien at all, but a hacking attempt. Yes, someone must have taken control of the computers.
I had no trouble memorizing the numbers:
? ??? ??? ? ??? ?? ??? ???? ???? ???? ??? ??? ? ??? ??? ??? ?? ?? ???
The sequence of numbers kept dancing before my eyes, but I couldn’t find any meaning. I quickly transcribed them mentally into plain binary:
1 100 100 1 101 10 111 1001 1001 1000 111 101 0 101 11 0 100 11 10 111
The next step eluded me. Converting them into decimal was easy, but the result?
Empty. Meaningless.
1, 4, 4, 1, 5, 2, 7, 9, 9, 8, 7, 5, 0, 5, 3, 0, 4, 3, 2, 7…
Nothing. The sequence seemed trivial, yet its beauty and the symmetry of its original forms unsettled me. What did it truly mean?
I was used to solving problems without effort, but this time something blocked me. Perhaps the sleepless hours had dulled my mind. I shouldn’t have been struggling like this. With an IQ of 212, I should have grasped it at once. Instead, I felt growing frustration, as though the answer was right there, under my nose, and still beyond reach.
When the computers stopped transmitting, my eyes fell on the clock: 07:32. Strangely, time had flown by. I began to consider other possibilities: could this have been a system attack? To seize control of the computers in such a way was far from easy—not with the defenses we had. ALMA 3’s signal came from space, from beyond the Earth. That much was certain. But from where exactly? From what coordinates? What was it saying?
Coordinates. Origin coordinates…
I flinched; something flashed across my mind, but I couldn’t grasp it. Damn, the protocol. I had to follow the protocol. In such cases, procedures were clear: everything must be reported in secret, as soon as possible. A brief message over the internal network, to the Observatory Director: