Enigma

She sits at her laptop at the kitchen table and thinks that, if they come, when they come, if they come in person – if they’re even persons – they will think she is an enigma.

She pauses, her fingertips on the keys, in the circle of light from the bare bulb hanging over the table. She thinks enigma because she does not want to think coward.

Will they have ideas of bravery? Of cowardice? Of puzzles? Will they even have ideas? This is the problem with inviting someone – something – else to solve a problem. You don’t know what other problems they’ll bring.

She puts the thought aside and starts typing. Envoy, her picosatellite, weighing just over half a kilo, will be launched tomorrow from the campus sports fields. It will carry her questions and her terrible request up to low Earth orbit and beam them outwards as far as the transmitter can throw them.

If they hear it, they have probably already seen and heard Voyager’s gold-plated calling card, with Kurt Waldheim’s heavily-accented greetings and a slew of images of a world which is no longer like that. Earth-sounds which are no longer relevant: whale song; bird song; crickets, frogs, elephants, horses, a kiss, wind, rain, surf.

Salvete quicumque estis; bonam erga vos voluntatem habemus, et pacem per astra ferimus.

She speaks for no United Nations but has, on her own initiative, decided to make a request of the listening universe, which her species cannot make.

The cubesat programming must be simple. She can send sound files of real life on earth: the sound of eight billion people; crying babies; the sound of dammed rivers, traffic, of bird strikes in jet engines, of animals in laboratory cages, of howitzers, of forest fires and chainsaws, of hydrogen bombs, and other primates doing something like weeping.

Come, she types. We are in agony. Come and end us for our own sake.

It will be terrible when they come, if they come. It will seem impossible that this immense act was invited by a girl at a kitchen table, listening to the sound of the night and the suffering.

She will be a profound enigma to them, as all of it is to her.