InterstellarNet: Origins Read Free

conclusion was tentative due to noise and signal fading. Xu’s team hoped to have recovered the full message from the many iterations within a week—if the signal persisted that long.
    Leave it to a scientist to render stultifyingly boring the discovery of intelligent aliens. But interesting or boring, the news was surely irrelevant to daily life on Earth.
    It was almost noon when Kim Chun Ku finally claimed his podium. Kim’s remarks confirmed what Charise already knew: He was an administrator. Passionless. Kim’s third viewgraph was an organization chart: five colored boxes. As one, the audience members checked out their name badges. Whispers erupted.
    Kim rapped his mike until order returned, then confirmed widespread suspicions. The colored stickers denoted committee assignments. After lunch, at committee breakout sessions, the teams would convene for the first time.
    The gold team, at the top of the chart, was the Steering Committee. Kim, of course, led the gold team. Its members were the leaders of the still undefined other teams, famous names from the SETI community, whatever SETI was, two assistants to ambassadors from COPUOS-participating countries, and a few UN agency heads like Bridget Satterswaithe. The leadership group, as far as Charise could tell, lacked representation from the less-developed countries.
    Of course.
    Blue team dealt with radio engineering, something about signal acquisition and recovery. They would work with the ITU on reducing Earth-originated interference in ET’s preferred frequencies. They would coordinate the efforts of radio observatories worldwide at monitoring ET’s signal. Blue team was mostly radio astronomers, including Sherman Xu, with some ITU staff thrown in.
    The Green team’s job struck Charise as the part of the project most likely to be second-guessed: analysis. They were tasked with decoding and interpreting ET’s message. Membership included lots of strange folks: a codebreaker from the American National Security Agency, mathematicians, linguists, and more SETI specialists.
    Gray team would ponder Earth’s possible response. Kim had, quite properly, decided that opening a dialogue with another civilization was not about science. With Security Council blessing he had staffed this committee entirely with diplomats. Linguists and mathematicians from Analysis would encode Earth’s message after a reply, if any, had been authorized. Studying gray team’s short list, Charise fumed: again, no representation from the developing countries.
    And the red team? The best had not been saved for last.
    Red denoted the Media & Education Committee. The group to which she had been relegated was to coordinate the release and spinning of everyone else’s work. Red team would also take questions and field unsolicited suggestions. Her committee mates were reporters—including the jerk who had just humiliated her, PR flacks, educators, a multicultural behavioral response team, and, oddly, an ITU-sponsored technocrat.
    Dr. Dean Matthews, by happenstance, was seated a few seats to Charise’s left. She had noticed him in the lobby: tall, about 185 centimeters; fit, in a middle-aged, office-worker sort of way; with wavy black hair and pale blue eyes. The title line on his badge read VP of Strategy and Technology, above a company name that was unfamiliar to her. He kept frowning at his nametag as though it might, if sufficiently rebuked, somehow change its spot.
    Charise shared Matthews’s disappointment, knowing no one would care. She was a credentialed ambassador, and this assignment was an affront. She had plenty of experience with such condescension, and with wringing every gram of possible advantage from others’ guilt. If they—a group of uncertain and fluid composition, but always including the United States government—believed she would quietly accept their “generosity” in being included in their task force, they would learn differently soon enough.
    ■□■
    “And