The Untranslated Section by Ben Roth
The signal was detected in mid-September. Statistical analyses of its patterns immediately suggested it was non-natural. Given how long and consistently its source system, that nearest to our own, had been monitored, scientists were confident that it was new, and so could place its date of origin: May, four years previously. This date was thought to be without meaning until researchers correlated it with events in our system, rather than Alpha Centauri. Doing so, they realized that the signal had been received 8.74 years—the time it would take light to travel from Earth to Proxima b, and then from Proxima b back to Earth—after worldwide denuclearization was achieved, on January 1 of the newly inaugurated calendar. Few thought this could be a coincidence; despite the instantaneous proliferation of theories, no one was able to offer a compelling case for what precisely it meant, however.
Cryptographers’ initial attempts at deciphering the signal proved fruitless. Their assumptions, that an intelligent communication would begin by encoding mathematical constants such as the value of pi or the atomic weight of hydrogen, yielded nothing. Neither, guided by the thought of what other sorts of information we had fancifully chosen to encode on Voyager’s Golden Record, did attempts to translate the signal’s binary code into audio information.
It took two years before any headway was made, by which time the world had long lost interest, distracted by more pressing concerns. Brazil had successfully revived its nuclear program, and was soon followed by Macao and the Republic of Texas. By the time tactical-sized weapons were deployed, over twenty countries were again hot.
Neither politicians nor content farms thus cared much when cryptographers made their first breakthroughs. The signal was confidently held to be structured as a five-dimensional lattice. Linguists explained that they had been stymied not only by this complex form, but because the alien language was neither alphabetic, nor pictographic, nor composed of phonemes. Instead, it seemed to consist of “concepts,” as they (amidst much disagreement) settled on calling them, but no stable, basic forms were isolatable. Quasi-repetitions were discerned, but they were never pure—instead each concept seemed to go through a process of morphing and elaboration depending on the others in its proximity, across all five dimensions of the “text.”
World leaders were interested only in the question of whether the signal might yield, and quickly, military applications. Most redirected resources toward more promising lines of research and development. Norway, lacking any other hope of strengthening its strategic position, instead doubled-down, pouring everything into translation.
Continued formal analyses had divided the signal into three sections. The meanings of the concepts in the first section and their interrelation were grasped vaguely at best—often not at all—but their relation was confidently taken to be temporal, prioritizing one of the dimensions of the text: this, then this, then this. Somewhat paradoxically, the second section of the signal made no use of the temporal relations between its concepts, yet appeared significantly more complicated. Its parts related in what was by contrast held to be a spatial manner, but the morphing and ramification between them were exponentially more elaborate.
The southern hemisphere now reduced to uninhabitability, the Norwegian scientific team struggled to get even their own politicians, who feared removal from office in the next election, to listen as they began to decipher significant portions of the signal’s first two sections. The first had started to look like a history, or perhaps chronicle was the more accurate term, or perhaps a fiction, or mythology—little could be discerned about the status of events connected temporally in it. Then the more complex second section began to come into focus as well: a zoo of different life-forms, hundreds of them seemingly most akin to fungi on our planet, in relation to what were thought to be artifacts or technologies. This last briefly interested the politicians, but the objects catalogued seemed rudimentary at best, and the researchers continued to struggle to make sense of the way that interrelations between the concepts took precedence in the alien grammar over stable description of its constituent parts.
Just as the Norwegians had their first, fumbling successes with the third and final section of the signal, foreign armies approached. In this section of the five-dimensional lattice, the principle of connectivity was not temporal (as in the first), nor spatial (as in the second), but rather logical, they now theorized. The breakthrough had come when they had made formal comparisons between the section and—willing to try anything, really—a database of pre-modern philosophical treatises. Under pressure from their constituents, losing allies, and surrounded by enemies bearing down on them ever more quickly, Norway’s leaders threw their hands up at this report—the thought that alien texts resembling medieval treatises on rhetoric and collections of ethical syllogisms would be of any use to them now!—and finally did what they should have years prior, redirecting all resources to weapons manufacture. The final section of the signal remains untranslated.
Ben Roth teaches writing and philosophy at Harvard and Tufts. Beyond his scholarly work, he has published criticism with Chicago Review, AGNI Online, 3:AM Magazine, The Millions, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He was recently a finalist in Cutbank's flash contest and has published short fiction with Nanoism, Flash, Blink-Ink, Sci Phi Journal, Aesthetics for Birds, Cuento Magazine, 101 Words, decomp journal, and Bodega Magazine (forthcoming). A recommendation flowchart he created for philosophical novels a couple of years ago was picked up by Open Culture and Lit Hub and has been shared thousands of times online.