FRAGMENT 02

July 2019.

Dryden I, the large-scale radio telescope built inside the Dryden crater on the far side of the moon, picked up a radio wave burst that was faint but fraught with meaning. It was a very short signal with a center frequency of 1420.406 megahertz, and over and over again it repeated twice, thrice, five times, seven times, eleven times, thirteen times, and seventeen times with small intervals in between.

Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen. Those are the first seven prime numbers, a fact that even elementary school students could understand. The news surged around the world, and scholars, experts, and amateur enthusiasts from every conceivable field threw themselves into analyzing the signal itself.

Taking the first letters of the words “seven prime numbers,” the signal was named the SPN Signal. Within one short week, this “message from space” had been translated in every conceivable way and presented on the Internet. But no one argument was strong enough to convince people universally.

It was only after everything had already begun and ended that it became clear that the SPN Signal had been a warning for a certain disaster.

September 2019.

In a number of energy-dense regions on Earth, the first organic extraterrestrial life-forms that the human race would encounter descended. But because they were so very small and couldn’t be called intelligent life-forms, knowledge of that fact was mostly limited to people involved in the encounters.