A la Node

48 – April First

The creature looked very much like a wasp, very insectile, articulated, inscrutable. Very buzzy. It tilted its head down in a way that should have been quite awkward, but was instead perfectly smooth and mechanically precise. Well, you get this sort of thing with aliens, the unnerving bodily movements, the strange smells, the general… well, alien-ness of them. It looked down at me, and amid the low polyphonic buzzing noises, a voice came, though honestly I never figured out if that voice came from some translation device or was crafted from a superposition of thousands of different pitches of buzz. Frankly, it got annoying sometimes, the buzzing.

“Are you certain this is the radio telescope? It seems terribly primitive, even for your people. I do not see a cognitive heuristic path condenser anywhere.”

“Hurry up, we need to plant the device before anyone comes in. I promise, it really is the best we can do so far.”

The buzzing modulated, fast then slow, then fast again.

“The will be very surprised, will they not? This joke of yours I quite like.”

Which surprised me, because up to that point I hadn’t been at all sure that Bob even grasped the concept of a joke. Bob was not his real name of course, and ‘he’ probably wasn’t the right pronoun for whatever passed for gender with those guys, but you get the drift. You have to make do with aliens. Anyway, the point was, I had convinced Bob to help me with possibly the finest April Fools day prank ever in the history of humanity, and up to that moment, I was pretty sure the entire notion of a prank had gone completely over his head. Carapace. Whatever.

I handed Bob the device, a small glowing blue cube that he had produced for me last night, but which he seemed entirely incapable of carrying himself. Bob never carried anything, had no pockets or bags, or any apparent interest in taking something in one of his many hands and transporting it from point A to point B. He could produce things from somewhere, somehow, but if not for me he would cheerfully have walked out the front door without the keystone to the entire operation.

What it did was this: it simulated an alien signal from deep space. All we had to do was toss it up onto the dish, and voila, signals from beyond. The device would camouflage itself, and was smart enough to know where the dish was pointing – it would send the signal only when the dish was pointed where it was right now, towards Cygnus A. I know, right? The perfect prank for a bunch of SETI radio astronomers – but it gets even better. I have a friend in Australia. You guessed it, Parks Bank radio telescope, and guess what I mailed him two weeks ago? Little glowing blue cube. Not only will my esteemed colleagues find clear intelligent signals from an alien civilization, but Parks Bank will confirm.

These are the kinds of things you can do when you have a friend from another planet. Also, major Irony bonus points for faking an alien signal with help from your alien pal.

Bob and I met years ago, when I was still an undergrad. I say met, but what I mean is, he appeared in my dorm room one night and waited patiently for me to stop screaming. It was the kind of dorm where you could scream for quite a while before anyone came to see why, so we were still alone when my throat finally gave out.

“You are the only human I feel I can approach,” the terrifying giant alien insect told me. “I feel an intellectual bond, I would like to be your friend. I can make myself hidden from other humans, though, so please do not try to tell anyone else of my existence.”

Sure, it took a while, but I think I can say we became friends after a while. All through school we stayed in touch, and now here he was helping me out with one hell of an April Fools Day gag.

“I wish Marsha could have come to see,” Bob opined, once he had thrown the cube up over the rim of the big dish. It was a throw I could not have made, but Bob’s long multi-jointed arms had no trouble. “Marsha has an interest in radio spectrum observation.”

Marsha was another alien, and if Bob was a giant wasp, then Marsha was a giant hedgehog. With prehensile spines. Bob had introduced us, and Marsha also decided she wished to be my friend. She had brought along Jeremy, Alexander and Frank. They liked me, they said, just don’t mention us to any of the other humans. And I hadn’t, who would have believed me anyway?

Bob and I jogged back to the control building, where all the signal processing equipment hummed away, sifting through the cosmic radio noise for patterns. Bob did his invisibility trick and his image wavered away. I made a cup of coffee and sat at my terminal, waiting for the guys to come in.

Then the morning started, like any other morning, all of use scanning the overnight data and looking over the plans for today’s observations. When the signal started, I expected the room to buzz like Bob with an allergy attack. I watched my screen as the signal jumped out of the static like Jaws. No one else seemed to notice. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and dumped it to a printer. I ripped the paper out and walked over to Barry, the director.

He looked down at the lines rising up from the baseline noise, beautiful peaks of strong modulated signal.

“Nah, looks like TV signal to me.” I stared at him, incredulous. I was so shocked I couldn’t figure out how to even articulate it for a moment.

“Barry, there’s nothing terrestrial transmitting anything near this frequency anywhere!”

“Meh. False positive, seen hundreds.” Stunned, I just stood there blinking at him. I rounded on Tom, one of the old techs who had been around the telescope for a all of living memory.

“Tom, look at this. And look, it’s still coming in, it’s on all the monitors!”

Tom took the paper out of my hand and looked gravely at it. “Probably just a cell tower, kid, false positive for sure.”

“Well call around, see if anyone else has seen it! Call Australia, they’ve still got Cygnus A in their field of view!”

“Nah, if anyone sees anything they’ll call us, we’ll hear about it soon enough.” He handed the paper back to me and wandered off.

I went to everyone there and got the same response, not a single person would even give it a second glance. As SETI, for god’s sake! These people spent their lives searching for the tiniest hint of extraterrestrial life, any signal that had even a trace of regularity to it would normally send them running for the phones. I realized that was the problem, this wasn’t a tiny trace of almost hidden regularity. I watched the pulses beat out prime numbers in sequences across a nearby screen. Too big, too clear, too strong. Trained by years of having to filter out planes and cellphones and satellites, they figured anything this clear had to be a false positive.

So my prank was not going off how I expected, that was OK. The signal would keep on, and eventually Australia would start asking around. They would hook up and compare notes, the little alien device would make it seem like there really was a signal coming in from Cygnus, the two widely spaced telescopes would make it clear that it wasn’t a terrestrial signal.

Or so I thought. The day ground on, every second taking at least fine minutes to pass. No calls. No interest in the signal. I was slowly deflating like an old balloon when the air wavered beside me and I heard a faint buzzing whisper.

“Maybe I should show myself, would that not certainly rouse them?”

I was shocked, but the part of me that had been anticipating the prank grasped at the proffered straw. “You would do that? But you never allow anyone to see you, that’s been our deal for years!” I glanced around to make sure no one was watching me whisper desperately at nothing.

“I think this one time, in the interest of the Prank, I would do this for you, my friend,” Bob buzzed back at me.

“Hit it!” I whispered, and stood up, knocking over my chair. Everyone turned at the noise, everyone was looking right at me, as Bob wavered into visibility. I stepped back, pretending to be amazed, and turned around to see how stunned my colleagues all were. Except they weren’t. Everyone turned back to what they were doing, except Barry, who just looked concerned.

“You OK there guy? Fall out of your chair?”

I pointed at Bob, tried to force words out of my mouth. Barry very clearly looked at the giant yellow and black wasp and then back at me. “What?”

I admit it, I gibbered. My jaw went up and down, I stuttered nonsense syllables and basically looked like a fool. I don’t know how long I would have continued, either, had Abbey not started giggling. I looked at her, she stood by the water cooler, hand over her mouth, struggling to suppress a laugh. She was looking directly at Bob.

Then the dam burst. Gales of laughter washed over me, everyone in the room had turned, and as if they had been holding it back for hours, the laughing rolled out of them, unstoppable. Tom literally fell on the floor and rolled.

“What the hell are you laughing about! There’s a freaking alien here! Alien! Alien! What’s wrong with you people!”

“We know!” gulped Barry, “we know! We’re all aliens! April Fools!”

Like a banana peel, Barry’s skin split open and fell away. If I hadn’t seen Alexander do that a dozen times, I would have freaked. Around the room, skins were being shed, prismatic costumes turned off, disguises abandoned. There was another wasp like Bob, small blue biped that reminded me of Smurfs, there were blobs and tentacles. All aliens, all of them, men and women I had known for over a year. Aliens.

“You should see the look on your face!” buzzed Bob. “Oh, beautiful prank!”

Barry, now in Smurf form, came up to me. “Oh, that was so much fun! I have never seen a human so surprised! Please don’t be angry, we are your friends, it was all in good fun, no? You taught us this, this Prank thing. Thank you so much.”

“My god, how many of you are there?”

They all crowded around me then, talking over one another in a headache-inducing mix of pitches and tones.

“Only about thirty percent of the population, but don’t tell anyone.” They all burst out laughing again, and finally, I started to laugh too.