When God Blinks - Episode 2

When God Blinks - Episode 2 Cover © Ganiu, 2021.

Previously on "When God Blinks"

NASA and related space agencies noticed first. Signals to ongoing missions beyond those in orbit around the Earth were all off by almost 30 minutes. Frantic investigation revealed that the same time discrepancy was occurring for all incoming signals. Naturally they came to the conclusion that the problem must therefore lay not with these external elements, but with the computers on Earth. But this led to a bigger question – one computer glitch was possible, but all of the various space agency’s computers across the globe showing the same failure at exactly the same time? Naturally, a virus or a sophisticated global hacking attack was the next obvious answer. An international team to investigate such a large, well-coordinated cyber-attack was being discussed when the first calls of alarm came in from confused and concerned astronomers, and the true significance of what had actually happened became known.

                       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Episode 2

“Maybe the ‘blink’ as they call it was God giving us a heads up, a warning to stop encroaching on his intellectual property, else risk the consequences.”

Then he grinned, his tried and true atheism once more reasserting itself.

“Personally, looking at all the facts so far accumulated, I believe the answer lies even further afield.” he said, a knowing smile on his face.

I took a comfort break at this point, shaking my head at this new conspiracy theory. When I got back, he’d moved on already, his head now buried in the side of a PC tower case now perched on a different desk he reserved for ‘mechanical endeavours’. It was quiet for a while, broken only by his humming as he fiddled inside the case whilst I looked for somewhere reasonably clean to sit. Then abruptly he spoke again, his voice oddly masked by the case.

“As I was saying, I believe the answers they seek lie further afield. I have statistical proof in fact.”

“Statistics?! You?”

He’d often laughed at statistics in the past, and blamed them for 78.65% of the world’s ills (in his mad pedantry, he had indeed worked out a formula that he said proved this figure). That being said, he told me once he could destroy the world with a single spreadsheet, and in my more fatalistic moments I honestly believed him.

“I accept, statistics in all their perceived infallibility, are the most fallible things in the world.” he mumbled from inside the case, reaching aimlessly for a screwdriver on the desk next to him with a hand coloured orange and black from a mix of grease and Cheetos.

Read Episode 1 here

“Take a work of fiction and add numbers to it, and suddenly it becomes non-fiction. Add a pie chart and a graph and it becomes an inviolate truth.”

“Bollocks” said I, only half listening as I lounged on a large dirty bean bag littered with wrappers and the odd wire.

He’d then retracted his head from the case, looked me in the eyes and said with a devilish glint in his own: “Pass it to the right people in the right places at the right time, and it becomes law.”

“Hmmm” I replied, deciding not to entertain his paranoid fantasies further in favour of a magazine I’d just found on the floor amongst all the other junk haphazardly discarded as part of his less than ordered, less than sanitary, lifestyle.

He grunted at my lack of enthusiasm for continuing one of his favourite topics, and buried his head back in the tower case once more before continuing anyway.

“However, in those cases I am referring to your basic, biased marketing, pressure group and political statistics. Now pattern recognition, that element within the field of otherwise exploitable statistics,

THAT I do have time for.”

Extracting his head again, he looked around the desk the case was on, shifting papers this way and that as he continued, partially lost in thought: “You’ve heard of SETI of course….”

“Hold on…if we’re heading into alien territory, you can kiss my ass right here and now.”

He fixed me with a glare, and I threw my hands up in the air in resignation, muttering: “I’m sorry, please continue oh knowledgeable one!”

“Thank you. SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, one of their jobs being the analysis of signals bouncing in and around our local galaxy.”

“Of which they have never found any conclusive proof of intelligent life.” I reminded him pointedly. He ignored me.

Read about the adopted child who was unable to save his foster parents and sister here

“What if the patterns they’ve been looking for are wrong? What if you could analyze these seemingly random signals another way. What if there is a pattern, but its spread over a longer period so you don’t even see it as a pattern. Ah ha!”

Triumphantly his hand came out of a pile of books clutching a pad of post-it notes, scattering the books across the desk in doing so. Fishing a pen from his trouser pocket, I saw him scribble ‘To Do’ on the top note and slap it on the side of the tower’s case, before turning around to face me with an excited grin on his face.

“Have you been watching the Discovery Channel again? Is there a UFO special on this week?” I asked knowingly.

He looked at me indignantly, though I noticed he quickly closed a TV guide that had been open on his desk amongst the mess.

“What if I told you I had written my own pattern recognition algorithm? What if I told you that I had found a message in those signals?”

“Bullshit.” I said quietly, suddenly a lot less sure of myself, now more than a little shaken by what this meant if he had indeed succeeded in discovering a message from an alien race.

“Well, it wasn’t easy” he continued, feigning an air of false modesty, “…and I do have the NSA to thank. Although if they discover I’ve been running this algorithm in the background on their decryption

supercomputer, then I may have to leave abruptly, or apologize. You never can tell what mood they’ll be in one day to the next…”

“Ben. What about the message?” I said firmly, cutting him short, standing to face him.

“Oh. That.”

He went quiet, looking around evasively. My doubts quickly returned.

“What was the message Ben?”

“Well, it was short, and it is really rather impressive decoding anything like this obviously…”

“Ben!”

Things aren't always what they seem, read ‘The Fairies’

He paused, and then said abjectly: “Hello. Are you content?”

There was a few seconds silence, before I started laughing uncontrollably, mostly out of relief. Ben looked indignant.

“Well, I think it’s a very poignant message. Better than ‘Prepare to be annihilated’.”

“Oh god….hold on a sec….I can’t breathe! You had me shitting myself for a moment there!”

“I take it then you don’t believe what I’ve found is a message from an alien race? Would you PLEASE stop laughing!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Ahhhhhhh…..Ben, you’ve got to admit, if you were to imagine contact from another species, I think I’d be looking for something a little more, I don’t know, profound? I mean, we’ve sent out a gold disk giving a snapshot of the human race and our knowledge. Music, mathematics, you name it. And what do the hyper intelligent aliens send back? The equivalent of ‘Have a Nice Day!’ ”

“You don’t think it’s from outer space then?” he reiterated.

I looked at his pained expression and answered in a more reasonable voice: “Look Ben, I’m sorry. I think your algorithm found a pattern that wasn’t there, and extrapolated meaning from it.”

Turning, I returned to the bean bag and my perusal of the magazine.

He stood there a few moments, and then he turned and flopped down in a large, comfortable swivel chair behind another desk, this one littered with laptops in various states of construction and destruction, connected by an array of cables in what appeared like haphazard fashion. Pressing the on switches of three of them, his face was illuminated in the telltale glow of their screens. His focus flitting between the screens and his fingers dancing across the keyboard in front of him, he had nevertheless decided to continue, and began outlining his newest theory.

“I disagree. I’ll go even further and state that this is an alien species with an interest in the human race. A species directly involved in the evolution of mankind.”

“Here we go. Are we really back on the ‘Engineers’ theory once more? Has Ridley Scott been sending you secret messages in his films again?” I muttered, not looking up from the page I was now reading.

He ignored this and continued: “Think about it. The human body is an amazing machine. It regulates itself, heals itself, and has the ability to create more of itself through reproduction…”

“I thought you only believed in things you had experienced for yourself?” I asked; peering over the top of the magazine at him, my voice now openly amused. I saw him scowl before he continued with his monologue.

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the human body is an amazing machine. And that is exactly what it is. A piece of technology, built using biological parts rather than mechanical ones. It is not however, a perfect machine.”

“What do you mean?” I asked despite myself.

“Well, think about it. It has its own defensive capabilities in the form of white blood cells to ward off illness, the ability to heal wounds, etcetera, etcetera. Occasionally though, this excellent piece of machinery goes wrong; it functions incorrectly. It overreacts to certain stimuli. It has a faulty piece of code if you will.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why, cancer of course!”

“What?!” I asked, shocked despite myself. It was only another crazy conversation with Ben, but the word ‘cancer’ always sent an involuntary shiver down my spine. I’d seen enough of its effects on friends and family to be adverse to even its mentioning. Ben though, oblivious to my discomfort, had continued: “Cancer is the body performing incorrect actions, creating cells where it does not need to. It’s not an attack from an external source causing this, but rather an internal failure of the biological system. A mistake nothing more.”

“We have in essence, a design flaw, and if our God or Gods are supposedly infallible, then logic dictates we were not built by a benign omnipotent being, but rather are constructs of more fallible ones. Action should have been taken to rectify these errors. To complain if you will.” Despite myself, I took another look over the magazine at him; nervous now for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on:

What happen when an 8 years is allow to sleep alone? Read here

“What. Did. You. Do?”

“Why, I sent a message back telling them this of course!”

——————————————————————————————–

I hadn’t seen Ben in six months. Work had kept me busy in London, and he wasn’t one for texting or casual telephone conversations to catch up. Then one day he called me up suddenly to come visit.

By this time, snippets of information about ‘the blink’ had begun to leak out onto the internet, on even some of the more respected sites and journals. Most normal people saw it as just another mad conspiracy theory. Having spoken to Ben before though when he’d outlined all the data, the fact

that other sources were now relaying the same information sent chills through me. It was one thing for it being just another of his crazy theories, but quite another when a growing number of external bodies were now seeming to confirm the event’s existence.

This time when I rang his doorbell he answered on the first ring, but I wasn’t ready for the sight when he opened the door. He was haggard and tired, like he hadn’t slept in days, and his clothes were rumpled and dirty, even more so than normal. As I stood there I caught a look in his eyes. They were bloodshot and there were large, dark circles under them, but there was a calm I hadn’t seen before, which was echoed in his voice as he welcomed me in. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, but then it dawned on me; I had seen and heard this kind of response before in those who were in the

final stages of terminal illness: acceptance.