New Phone, Who Dis? a sci-fi short | PART ONE (OF THREE)
Look, before we start rolling, you have to promise again you won’t edit me as some lunatic conspiracy theorist. I’ve had enough trouble with alien invasion fanatics, new age cults camping outside my house. I only want to present the facts and get back to teaching. Life was so much simpler before all this. God, and so messy since this year, when all the records got declassified. Are we rolling? OK, well I suppose I should introduce myself.
My name’s Dr. Emily Harper, I’m a tenured professor at Stanford, in the field of linguistics. Yes, I’ve worked with SETI before, consulting on some of their signal collection and analysis programs, code breaking basically. I mean, I’m a nerd at heart, I love those guys, it’s a refreshing break, creating new languages, instead of studying old ones. And they had some shit hot tech! Sorry, I’m still a bit nervous. Tech that was making even the NSA jealous. But no, I had never worked with NASA before, certainly never dreamed I’d be contacted by their project team for the 2nd James Webb Telescope. That was an exciting phone call! I had only read about their launch in the news, but let’s just say my inner space geek was fangirling pretty hard.
You have to understand, this was an exciting time for everyone across the world. It was the 50’s! You know, the 2050’s, stop it, I’m not that old. The Age of Complacency! Sorry, cut that, I don’t want to sound cynical. You know, the Age of Autonomy, we had passed the crawling stages, the information age, the age of assistance. Most country’s AI had reached general cognition, but not super intelligence or sentience, certainly not the ‘singularity’ that was predicted. We got that under better control quicker than expected. But we did have a monster of a powerhouse at our fingertips, general cognition, solving all our world’s problems. You’ve read the stories, everything self-governing: self-building cities, self-governing construction sites, self-governing companies, households, lifestyles and wellness. We got pretty lazy as humans for a while. I say that with love, believe me, we all enjoyed the fruits of a newly automated world. It’s just, we seemed to forget ourselves a bit.
Where was I? Solving our world’s problems. Right, we were so busy with our attention turned inward, we stopped thinking about looking, you know, up. We used to dream of colonizing Mars for crying out loud, building a highway of space stations to the asteroid belt! Where were the dreamers and the futurists? So when I read about programs like SETI, NASA getting funded again, I was giddy. Making the biggest news waves, the funding for a new James Webb Space Telescope. If you know your history, this was the big one in the 2020’s, replacing the Hubble. I was just a toddler, but I’ve been told we needed this, a reason to dream, afraid of germs, afraid of each other, afraid of annihilation. Hovering in low orbit with these majestic golden mirrors, the ‘James Webb’ was a beacon of hope, sending us back stunningly detailed images of the observable universe, light captured that was thirteen billion years old, back to the dawn of creation. They were gorgeous and chilling for the time, beautifully high definition, swirling palettes of galaxies and rippling gas clouds, like dynamic NFT artwork.
Is this OK so far? I don’t need a break, but I know you’re eager to get to the discovery. Let me just wrap this up. Remember again, we went into the next two decades still fearful of the artificial intelligence ‘singularity’, where we lost control of this dragon, like Prometheus chucking fire around a dry forest. Meanwhile, NASA was collecting all this interstellar data and pictures, they only lacked the resources to analyze the billions of tiny point pixels of stars and nebulae, sorting out which ones could have earth-like planets.
Oh right, I should explain that, ‘seeing’ exoplanets is pretty hard outside our solar system, they’re too small and swallowed up by the immense light of the nearest star. It’s like measuring a spec of dust wedged deep into one glowing pixel of a gigantic IMAX screen. Except you know, billions of miles away. But we have some clever tricks, you know, we could take photos and compare them, if the slight dimming implied an exoplanet eclipsing its own star. Or we can detect small wobbles in the star, implying what tiny gravity forces are tugging at it. So ‘measuring’ exoplanets, opposed to ‘seeing’ them, was an incredibly slow and tedious way to do detective work. But hey, you’re interviewing some really smart astronomers after me, so let’s move on.
The point here is mapping out the universe, surprise surprise, was hard. Call it fractal, the closer you look, the more infinitely complex it gets. We needed higher resolutions, we needed swarms of multi-angle feeds, the ‘before and after shots’ weren’t good enough. And of course we needed incredible processing power to analyze it all. And all our AI resources were busy, turned inwards, solving our ‘real world’ problems, energy crisis, climate change, economic collapse. You name it, we had a queue and space programs weren’t a priority. But once all that dust settled, like I said, it was the 50’s, we were hitting the bottom of our to-do list, maybe we were getting bored, so imagination and innovation started to get, um, fashionable again.
Enter James Webb 2.0, aka Spiderman, thirty years after the original. It was a new beacon of hope in the scientific community. It represented everything to us, a chance to build and study new fields again, it meant we had cleared the smaller worries, and our gazes returned to the stars. It was a beautiful, well funded project, so much bigger, so much more powerful. It operated analogously the way original search engines like Google used spider programs, trillions of feeler programs bouncing around the galaxy, returning mountains of data, video feeds and in 3D! Or 4D even, if you count the age of the light. Most importantly, Webb 2.0 would be powered by the slickest, state-of-the art AI for analysis at quantum scales of speed and detail, simultaneously in space and at the control station, the intelligence they affectionately named MARVIN.
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Paul Carreo 