1 - Prologue

It began as a whisper that careened off concave surfaces to orchestrate itself into the Sound. The Sound was amazing and awful. It heralded a beginning unlike any since the Universe’s creation, before lapsing back into the silence that had birthed it. The Sound had lasted less than a second, but that was an aeon to those who had been listening since before humans had painted cave walls. 

Once the importance given to the Sound had passed, the Light arced into existence. To the human eye it would be harsh and foreboding, like a misfiring fluorescent lamp in a horror movie. But given the right viewing spectrum, the Light was gorgeous. Like the Sound it began slightly, before erupting like a rapturous firework. The Light was not reticent, but purposeful and titanic. The Light floated, tracing a graceful trajectory towards the Sound’s source. Here a glowing, spherical glyph rotated. Vivid shades of blue and green shone brighter as the Light approached. The Light paused. The glyph contained potential previously beyond possibility. The Light crept closer to the glyph, as if worried that it would cause the glyph to melt and remove all hope. Yet the glyph remained. If anything, it glowed with greater vigor as if drawing strength, power, and belief from the Light. When the Light was next to the glyph it halted. A hairline, amber beam extended from the Light towards the glyph. The instant the beam touched the glyph a supernova erupted, and the universe accepted it into its fold. Now came the Chord. The Chord contained layer upon layer of faceted notes, intertwining and massaging each other. It was wondrous and fantastic to its audience. The Light reflected the Chord through every division of its radiance, so that the message would be heard. 

The beings of Light and Sound understood the Chord immediately. A petition was made, and an Emissary was dispatched.

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Dr. Mikkel Stengaard specialized in finding Earth-like planets. He was known in astronomical circles for being methodical, which he knew was how academics said boring. NASA had dexterously tempted him away from the embarrassing Danish winter of 2027, with a four-year contract looking for Earth 2.0. That the weather in California’s Silicon Valley would also help advance his golf handicap was a nifty bonus. He had reasoned that the combination of otherworldly science, and sporting heroics would make him enthralling to the opposite sex. Sadly, this had remained a theory since his arrival at the Ames Research Center.  His current probability analysis projected a greater chance of him discovering intelligent life than either hitting a green in regulation, or getting to first base. 

The analysis room for TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was not how Stengaard had imagined it back in Copenhagen where snow had blasted badly budgeted windows. He had pictured the latest AI computers, Ultra-8K 3D graphics, and terabit networking. Instead the analysis desk was populated by an aged HP computer and three monitors at varying heights, none of which would move. Despite being a self-certified genius, and liberal application of WD-40, he had yet to deduce why the monitors were stuck. The only object on the desk exhibiting any 3D attributes was the mouse pad. This pictured an alluring woman whose breasts had been raised for the purposes of preventing repetitive strain injury and (presumably) titillating the user. The order of preference was presumably optional based on said user. That over half of TESS’ employees were women seemed to have escaped the pad’s provider; clearly it had been supplied in a less enlightened time. But why a manager had not binned the damn thing was a mystery. Every time Stengaard’s wrist touched the silicon b***s, he felt both arousal and loathing. He was thus left with the contradictory feeling that he both loved and hated the tit-pad. Wedged between these extremes, he had - and this decision was entirely due to an astrophysicist called Jessica Mutz - recently decided to despise it. He had devised a plot to steal the pad and burn it in the alley behind his apartment. But, due to the 24/7 surveillance system in the analysis room, he had not yet worked up the courage to do it. He wanted the pad gone, but didn’t want to be blamed/fired/celebrated/honored, nee loved for doing it. 

Stengaard looked at the horrifyingly cheap analogue clock on the wall, power cable dangling limply from its anus. For the umpteenth time he mentally counted down the seconds to the next, twice-daily update as TESS reached perigee with Earth. The computer screens mocked him with their star-field screen savers. At the beginning he had been fresh and keen. But as weeks had stretched into months, and months had warped into years, he had developed a mental callous to the updates. He was aware of this atrophy, yet seemed incapable of doing anything about it. He wondered how Einstein would have accounted for the slowing of time during clock-watching. No doubt the venerable father of modern physics would have chided him for not finding a way to fill the time with something more educational than searching for a way to economically import Aalborg aquavit. You could get Norwegian stuff in the US, but it wasn’t the same as the nectar from home. He had recently arrived at the realization that his clock watching wasn’t really about passing time to the next update. After two years, he was really counting the seconds until he could go home to Denmark.

As if to imitate their cosmic cousins, the dust particles circulating around the analysis room followed predictable patterns. They floated on air currents which varied little, owing to the Centre’s controlled atmosphere. But today, repair work was being done on the air-conditioning. So the normal flow of air had changed sufficiently to cause long-serving dust to be blown off the tops of rarely cleaned cabinets. One such spec of dust, innocent in size and unaware of the walk-on part it would play in the most phenomenal event in Earth’s history, hitched a lift on one of the extraordinary air currents. Like a careful vulture, it descended lazily towards the unsuspecting Stengaard.

Finally the clock ticked over to 3 pm. The computer sighed as its cooling fans kicked in and its prehistoric hard disk made clicking sounds. Stengaard had already diagnosed that, like the famed ‘big one’ earthquake, a catastrophic IT-heart attack was overdue. Data started to flow along the screens. He straightened, and inhaled deeply through his nose. The dust particle, vacuumed rudely from its descent, whooshed up his left nasal passage. There it tickled one of the hairs evolved by natural selection to stop invaders of just this ilk from starting a business in his lungs. The sneeze came upon him violently. His head snapped back as the sharp intake of breath prepared to rid his nose of the intruder. The force of the exhalation made his eyes bulge. With no thought to where he was, Stengaard blew nasal detritus all over the central monitor, positioned as it was at exactly the right height to catch the full force of the blowout.

“For helvede!” Stengaard swore. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then frantically searched for something to clean the screen. He found a handkerchief of dubious cleanliness in his pocket. He stared at it accusingly, but comprehended that it would be unlikely to wash clean unless he took it out of his shorts before laundering them. He gave the monitor a hasty wipe before anyone came in. The handkerchief, in the manner of objects put to a task for which they were not designed, smeared viscous nasal material across the monitor. In the lower right-hand portion of the screen, assigned the constellation of Libra, a smear of Stengaard’s snot camouflaged a flashing emerald dot representing the red dwarf Gliese-581. Had he seen this, Stengaard would have been excited. Emerald indicated that TESS had discovered a planet matching a set of strict search criteria of his own design. Emerald indicated a planet that was not only in the ‘Goldilocks’s Zone’ of optimum distance from its sun. That wasn’t unusual, however in the case of an emerald planet it also had dimethyl sulfide (produced by organic life) and, crucially, evidence of chloroflurocarobons (produced by certain industrial processes) in its atmosphere. What this added up to was a planet that planet that could, and in this case possibly did support life. 

However Stengaard did not see the flashing emerald light, did not recognize it, and did not act on it. In that moment he did not do many things. He did not set in motion a chain of events that would have been as the flicking of the first domino in a pattern of change so vast that no living thing on Earth would be unaffected. As it was, a snozzberry from a Danish scientist working in America caused a half-American boy living in Denmark to take up the mantle of ‘domino-flicker supreme’. And although the first domino on Earth had not yet toppled, dominos at other ends of the pattern had already struck their neighbors. The boundaries of the pattern were cosmic in their circumference. The matrix of the universe had already changed from feral static to rampant advancement. Inevitably the toppling tiles would collide, yet the inhabitants of Earth still enjoyed a mercifully straightforward, mundane pace of life, blissfully ignorant of the mysteries of the universe. This would not last for long.