Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[piecewise]

SECRET//OIPA//NOFORN//ORCON//RESTRICTED//25X1
   To: OIPA Director [name redacted]
   From: [name redacted], Director of 16 Cygni studies at Arecibo 2 Lunar Radio Telescope

   At approximately 21:52 GMT 9/15/2129, mining station number 11287 on asteroid 3753 Cruithne began receiving signals of an unknown origin. These signals, first thought to be interference, were determined to be what is known as “Single frequency noise”, indicating that the transmissions were unnatural in origin.  Further investigation determined the origin of these signals to be 16 Cygni, a triple star system roughly seventy light years from earth. By coincidence, 16 Cygni was one of 45 star systems chosen for SETI/ METI broadcasts during the early twenty first century, and as such had received a “Cosmic Call”  message (a collection of data including human dna sequences, chemical information and our location in the solar system) roughly sixty years prior, leaving only only a decade before Earth could expect a reply.

   For the next ten years Arecibo 2, as well as other extraplanetary radio telescopes continued to monitor the transmissions of our distant neighbors. Like the original, most transmissions were too degraded to be useful, however some remained partially intact, allowing sections of the alien language to be deciphered.  This information, minus specific details, has been made available to the public for years, however the following information has only recently been attained and has not been announced.

   As of 10/07/39,  Arecibo 2 has received transmissions directly relating to the SETI broadcast 140 years ago. These transmissions were at a higher frequency then those previous, and it is assumed that they were sent with the intent of contacting Earth. The last of these transmissions was received on 04/13/42 and reads as follows:

   [Untranslatable greeting phrase]

   [collective pronoun] have [accepted/received] the [creation/art/artifact] of the [honorary/ greater being] and have tried to [become/change into] what the [creation/art/artifact] [shows/describes].    The [change/transformation] is [harmful/poisonous] to many, but we [proceed/continue] [knowing/understanding] we are becoming [nearer/closer/similar] to [honorary/greater being]. But there are still those who [doubt/disbelieve]. [Unintelligible] speak against [honorary/greater being] [power/divinity] and [desire/wish] to bring [great harm/war/destruction] upon [honorary/greater being]. [They/others] say [honorary/greater being] message is    [false/deceptive], that it is the [creation/work] of [ordinary/mundane] [creatures/animals]. But [collective pronoun [knows/understands] the message is a [divine/powerful] [creation/art/artifact]. [Collective pronoun] asks for [protection/salvation] as [collective    pronoun] make [present area/ here] ready for [honorary/greater being].

Shortly after this transmission was received a great amount of high frequency electromagnetic radiation, mostly gamma radiation, was detected coming from the  16 Cygni system. This burst of gamma rays was deemed too small and focused to be natural, and is instead considered more consistent with a large scale use of nuclear weapons. No further transmissions have been detected. The staff of  Arecibo 2 is seeking guidance from the OIPA as to how this information should be handled.




feel free to offer feed back

[Supermikhail]

Earth should be capitalized. Also kind of not timely. I imagine it would have worked better at the peak of the Cold War, in 1960s or whatever.

Now a bit of something else entirely, and I'm out of here.

piecewise, why the fuck do you keep posting your stories here? Do <3 replies boost your ego so much or drive you onward, or these <3 replies give such great feedback that you want to come back again and again? Your stories are essentially at the professional level, and whatever could be improved in them a professional editor wouldn't be bothered to point out. Are you driving the agenda of free entertainment or something?

Or you don't want to be a professional writer?

[Armok]

In relation to the above comment, this'd fit perfectly on 365tomorrows.com

[piecewise]

This isn't the only place I post it, I just post it here too because the DF community seems to like this kind of thing on occasion. As long as someone here enjoys it then I'll keep posting; after all, it's less about an ego boost, more about creating something that people enjoy.

Oh and thanks for the link Armok, that looks like a good site.

[Gigalith]

WARNING WARNING WARNING MERCILESS FEEDBACK IS APPROACHING WARNING WARNING WARNING

Where is the point? How is this story at all new, moving, or interesting?

Let's start with the unnecessary part of the story, which is most of it. Four fifths of your story is wasted prose. You take three paragraphs and a header to say "As of 10/07/39,  Arecibo 2 has received transmissions [from 16 Cygni] directly relating to the SETI broadcast 140 years ago." Everything else is either implied or irrelevant.

Moving on to internal consistency, this is not how a top-secret email reads. Neither Director [name redacted] or Director [name redacted] need to be shielded from knowledge of each others names. Nor, unless there are multiple directors of their respective organizations, is this redaction even meaningful. We also see that Director [name redacted] fails to include either a greeting or a signature when writing to his ultra-mega-superior. At least the aliens said [untranslatable hello].

As we move on to the transmission itself, we stumble over several more consistency issues. How does the government plan to keep a broadcast presumably powerful enough to reach Earth from being discovered by random private observatories along the way? What with the first contact with alien life and all, I'd think there would be amateurs pointing their receivers at 16 Cygni. For that matter, how is this the first transmission from the Transcygnists? Between the time the SETI signals reached 16 Cygni  and the time the Transcygnists send their mega-transmission, there's bound to have been prayers, talk show debates with the Humatheists, references in their radio comedies, advice for chopping off unhuman appendages, etc. This had to be in the previous corpus, so how is the existence of the Transcygnists supposed to be a surprise?

[alien concepts/ideas/thought] inexpressible in [English/human speak] is [negative] a new [concept/thought]. [pronoun] is also [irritating/painful] to [read/understand]. It also [negative] [makes sense/fits] [here/current location], because how [did/activity] the [translators/scientists/linguists] [figure out/discover] [article] [meaning/shade/nuances]? For that [topic/mass-energy], why [did/activity] the [translators/scientists/linguists] have some parts in [English/human speak] and others in [alien concepts/ideas/thought]?

This is not how an alien message asking for aid from the Space Gods would read. Where is the praise? The asking of forgiveness for insufficient Transcygnist progress? Why are they complaining about the process of humanification, instead of boasting how far they've already come? Why are they talking about the position of the Humatheists instead of asking the Space Gods to smite the [heathen/unbelievers/unwilling]?

Let's stop and think about the theme, however. Suppose SETI today received a transmission from aliens, containing alien DNA. Which would Joe Q. Public think:

A)  "OH MAN! SPACE ALIENS! WHAT A DISCOVERY!"

B)  "OH MAN! SPACE ALIENS! TIME TO SOW A TRUNK ONTO MY FACE AND INJECT SPACE DNA INTO MY BLOODSTREAM!"

And how is Xlorbothek 9. Alien going to react any different?

We end with the destruction of the story's meaning with the aliens. If you stopped at the message, you would leave the reader with a moral question: what do to if aliens start worshiping your species? This is perfect for flash fiction. Instead, the question is rendered moot by the nonexistence of any aliens.

WARNING WARNING RANT LEVEL INCREASING WARNING WARNING 

If you're trying to create something people enjoy, I'll be blunt: Drop the overused "Religion and its adherents are evil/stupid" cliche, lock it up, and never use it again. It doesn't even matter if you didn't intend to say anything of the sort. It gravely offends the majority of the world's population, preaches to the choir of those who don't like religion, and boring those in the middle to tears. There's at least one magazine and one anthology which will reject such stories out of hand, and neither is religious.

It's one thing to say "This thing is evil, and evil people worship it.", because both believers and unbelievers hold there to be evil things people falsely worship. It's another to say "Religion in general is evil, and people who worship are evil", because that's the overdone cliche. It is better to maintain balance, and have good people who are wrong and evil people who are right. Better still to have neither good or bad people, but people who have chosen their path, and may yet stray from it, for such is reality.

 

[piecewise]

Where is the point? How is this story at all new, moving, or interesting?

I dunno. Personally I really don't see anything as new or interesting anymore. Everything is just a rearrangement of tropes and tiresomely predicable. But then again I'm incredibly cynical and never really like anything I or anyone ever does so meh.

Let's start with the unnecessary part of the story, which is most of it. Four fifths of your story is wasted prose. You take three paragraphs and a header to say "As of 10/07/39,  Arecibo 2 has received transmissions [from 16 Cygni] directly relating to the SETI broadcast 140 years ago." Everything else is either implied or irrelevant.

True.

Moving on to internal consistency, this is not how a top-secret email reads. Neither Director [name redacted] or Director [name redacted] need to be shielded from knowledge of each others names. Nor, unless there are multiple directors of their respective organizations, is this redaction even meaningful. We also see that Director [name redacted] fails to include either a greeting or a signature when writing to his ultra-mega-superior. At least the aliens said [untranslatable hello].

In reality this started out as having most of the details censored, but I decided not to do that. I just didn't add in the names because...well because knowing them didn't seem that important. And I'm lasy, that too. I can always add a "sup bitches" or something in the beginning if that seems like a glaring omission. Sup bitches is what the military uses right?

As we move on to the transmission itself, we stumble over several more consistency issues. How does the government plan to keep a broadcast presumably powerful enough to reach Earth from being discovered by random private observatories along the way? What with the first contact with alien life and all, I'd think there would be amateurs pointing their receivers at 16 Cygni. For that matter, how is this the first transmission from the Transcygnists? Between the time the SETI signals reached 16 Cygni  and the time the Transcygnists send their mega-transmission, there's bound to have been prayers, talk show debates with the Humatheists, references in their radio comedies, advice for chopping off unhuman appendages, etc. This had to be in the previous corpus, so how is the existence of the Transcygnists supposed to be a surprise?

well, it's less the broadcast and more the fact that most people can't decode the language, so they can't understand what the message means. It's also not the first one, in fact i said it was the LAST one. The line "As of 10/07/39,  Arecibo 2 has received transmissions directly relating to the SETI broadcast 140 years ago. These transmissions were at a higher frequency then those previous, and it is assumed that they were sent with the intent of contacting Earth" is meant to imply that they've been sending things to earth for years now. I could add a line about how their transmissions are showing "escalating tension" if this is unclear though.

[alien concepts/ideas/thought] inexpressible in [English/human speak] is [negative] a new [concept/thought]. [pronoun] is also [irritating/painful] to [read/understand]. It also [negative] [makes sense/fits] [here/current location], because how [did/activity] the [translators/scientists/linguists] [figure out/discover] [article] [meaning/shade/nuances]? For that [topic/mass-energy], why [did/activity] the [translators/scientists/linguists] have some parts in [English/human speak] and others in [alien concepts/ideas/thought]?

True enough, but the alternatives are a bit worse. I could do the star trek thing and just have a bunch of humanoids speaking perfect English, or the Lovecraft thing of having everything just be indecipherable, but both would kind of render the story unable to be made. As per the translation, I dunno, can you think of a better way to do it? To express a only partially decoded language with some words that the definition is only vaguely known? Cause I don't know.

This is not how an alien message asking for aid from the Space Gods would read. Where is the praise? The asking of forgiveness for insufficient Transcygnist progress? Why are they complaining about the process of humanification, instead of boasting how far they've already come? Why are they talking about the position of the Humatheists instead of asking the Space Gods to smite the [heathen/unbelievers/unwilling]?

Well, this is probably easy to mistake and probably my fault, but it was less space gods and more "greater beings" that these aliens thought humans were. It's kind of like how we have those people who think that the aliens built the pyramids or gave us technology etc. The idea was that they thought the humans were some great alien civilization offering some form of ultimate knowledge or salvation, and that the message was a guide on how to go about receiving it/enacting it. It's probably my fault for using "divine" rather then "enlightened" to describe things.

Let's stop and think about the theme, however. Suppose SETI today received a transmission from aliens, containing alien DNA. Which would Joe Q. Public think:

A)  "OH MAN! SPACE ALIENS! WHAT A DISCOVERY!"

B)  "OH MAN! SPACE ALIENS! TIME TO SOW A TRUNK ONTO MY FACE AND INJECT SPACE DNA INTO MY BLOODSTREAM!"

And how is Xlorbothek 9. Alien going to react any different?

Well, I could say that you really don't know how they'll react considering the fact that their culture, paradigms, concepts of thought and practically everything is entirely different and alien to you, but thats a bit of a cop out.But The space pirates injected Phazon, a highly dangerous, nearly instantly fatal substance into themselves to make themselves better, and people have been eating stupid and poisonous things for thousands of years with the hope that it will somehow increase their vitality or virility.  Is it really THAT alien to think that someone might, in the context of a message from space dictating a great deal of biological information, think that some alien species is trying to send them some sort of cure or enhancement?

We end with the destruction of the story's meaning with the aliens. If you stopped at the message, you would leave the reader with a moral question: what do to if aliens start worshiping your species? This is perfect for flash fiction. Instead, the question is rendered moot by the nonexistence of any aliens.

very true. I think I'll rewrite it like that actually.

If you're trying to create something people enjoy, I'll be blunt: Drop the overused "Religion and its adherents are evil/stupid" cliche, lock it up, and never use it again. It doesn't even matter if you didn't intend to say anything of the sort. It gravely offends the majority of the world's population, preaches to the choir of those who don't like religion, and boring those in the middle to tears. There's at least one magazine and one anthology which will reject such stories out of hand, and neither is religious.

It's one thing to say "This thing is evil, and evil people worship it.", because both believers and unbelievers hold there to be evil things people falsely worship. It's another to say "Religion in general is evil, and people who worship are evil", because that's the overdone cliche. It is better to maintain balance, and have good people who are wrong and evil people who are right. Better still to have neither good or bad people, but people who have chosen their path, and may yet stray from it, for such is reality.

Like I said above, it was less about religion more about miscommunication and the difficulty of conversing with a society completely different from your own. It was basically just this idea of "what would an alien civilization really think about the arecibo message?" Would they realize it's just an attempt to say "we're out here" or would they see it as something more meaningful? Would the populous except the idea of an alien race that isn't some sort of greater being? It's my fault if this wasn't communicated effectively though. It's a bit ironic actually.

[Gigalith]

As we move on to the transmission itself, we stumble over several more consistency issues. How does the government plan to keep a broadcast presumably powerful enough to reach Earth from being discovered by random private observatories along the way? What with the first contact with alien life and all, I'd think there would be amateurs pointing their receivers at 16 Cygni. For that matter, how is this the first transmission from the Transcygnists? Between the time the SETI signals reached 16 Cygni  and the time the Transcygnists send their mega-transmission, there's bound to have been prayers, talk show debates with the Humatheists, references in their radio comedies, advice for chopping off unhuman appendages, etc. This had to be in the previous corpus, so how is the existence of the Transcygnists supposed to be a surprise?

well, it's less the broadcast and more the fact that most people can't decode the language, so they can't understand what the message means. It's also not the first one, in fact i said it was the LAST one. The line "As of 10/07/39,  Arecibo 2 has received transmissions directly relating to the SETI broadcast 140 years ago. These transmissions were at a higher frequency then those previous, and it is assumed that they were sent with the intent of contacting Earth" is meant to imply that they've been sending things to earth for years now. I could add a line about how their transmissions are showing "escalating tension" if this is unclear though.

The message reads like a first transmission. "We're here, people are trying to blow us up, u giv hlp plz, etc."

[alien concepts/ideas/thought] inexpressible in [English/human speak] is [negative] a new [concept/thought]. [pronoun] is also [irritating/painful] to [read/understand]. It also [negative] [makes sense/fits] [here/current location], because how [did/activity] the [translators/scientists/linguists] [figure out/discover] [article] [meaning/shade/nuances]? For that [topic/mass-energy], why [did/activity] the [translators/scientists/linguists] have some parts in [English/human speak] and others in [alien concepts/ideas/thought]?

True enough, but the alternatives are a bit worse. I could do the star trek thing and just have a bunch of humanoids speaking perfect English, or the Lovecraft thing of having everything just be indecipherable, but both would kind of render the story unable to be made. As per the translation, I dunno, can you think of a better way to do it? To express a only partially decoded language with some words that the definition is only vaguely known? Cause I don't know.

If the aliens believe that humans are superior, I'd think they'd be trying to speak whatever languages they could decipher from the Cosmic Call. As a greeting, they might echo the entire first section, thinking that's how the Greater Beings say hi.

This does mean that random bystanders would also understand the message, but that's not necessarily a problem. "Hey guys? You know those aliens? They've started trying to turn into us. Also, now everybody knows about this. This might be a problem."

Let's stop and think about the theme, however. Suppose SETI today received a transmission from aliens, containing alien DNA. Which would Joe Q. Public think:

A)  "OH MAN! SPACE ALIENS! WHAT A DISCOVERY!"

B)  "OH MAN! SPACE ALIENS! TIME TO SOW A TRUNK ONTO MY FACE AND INJECT SPACE DNA INTO MY BLOODSTREAM!"

And how is Xlorbothek 9. Alien going to react any different?

Well, I could say that you really don't know how they'll react considering the fact that their culture, paradigms, concepts of thought and practically everything is entirely different and alien to you, but thats a bit of a cop out.But The space pirates injected Phazon, a highly dangerous, nearly instantly fatal substance into themselves to make themselves better, and people have been eating stupid and poisonous things for thousands of years with the hope that it will somehow increase their vitality or virility.  Is it really THAT alien to think that someone might, in the context of a message from space dictating a great deal of biological information, think that some alien species is trying to send them some sort of cure or enhancement?

True enough.

There's a possible twist here: The Cygnians are actually (a hive race/detritus of genetic experiments), and they have (no independence/terrible, misshapen genes). Becoming human really is an improvement, but it's (causing hives to split apart and war/wrecking havoc on the ecosystem because of weird new amino acids and proteins.) This might be too big for a flash fiction, but if you decide to expand the story it's a possibility.
 

If you're trying to create something people enjoy, I'll be blunt: Drop the overused "Religion and its adherents are evil/stupid" cliche, lock it up, and never use it again. It doesn't even matter if you didn't intend to say anything of the sort. It gravely offends the majority of the world's population, preaches to the choir of those who don't like religion, and boring those in the middle to tears. There's at least one magazine and one anthology which will reject such stories out of hand, and neither is religious.

It's one thing to say "This thing is evil, and evil people worship it.", because both believers and unbelievers hold there to be evil things people falsely worship. It's another to say "Religion in general is evil, and people who worship are evil", because that's the overdone cliche. It is better to maintain balance, and have good people who are wrong and evil people who are right. Better still to have neither good or bad people, but people who have chosen their path, and may yet stray from it, for such is reality.

Like I said above, it was less about religion more about miscommunication and the difficulty of conversing with a society completely different from your own. It was basically just this idea of "what would an alien civilization really think about the arecibo message?" Would they realize it's just an attempt to say "we're out here" or would they see it as something more meaningful? Would the populous except the idea of an alien race that isn't some sort of greater being? It's my fault if this wasn't communicated effectively though. It's a bit ironic actually.

Ironic indeed.