The Greenhouse was pale blue and white wood, a café with a view out to Marchmont Road. The menu was modern breakfast stuff, way overpriced. José was at the counter picking up a black coffee for Hannah and a tea for himself. Across the room were two young mums with three toddlers between them, juggling to get a word in edgeways with each other. Hannah pictured her and Indy like that, kids smeared in jam crawling all over them.
José looked nervous as he returned with the drinks and sat down.
‘This place seems expensive,’ Hannah said.
José moved the menus out of the way. ‘I wouldn’t normally come here.’
‘But I’m a secret you don’t want your girlfriend to know about.’
José looked shocked but she knew he lived with her around the corner on Thirlestane Road, it wasn’t a massive leap.
‘Olivia doesn’t know about this. I don’t want her to find out.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘That’s impossible.’
The shocked look returned to his face. ‘This has nothing to do with her.’
Hannah sipped her coffee, too hot. She splayed her hands out on the table. ‘We don’t know that. The vast majority of these cases, it’s friends or family playing games. I have to meet everyone close to you.’
He squirmed in his seat. ‘Maybe we should forget it.’
Hannah shrugged. ‘It’s up to you, I’m just saying how it is.’
José rubbed his stubbled face then ran a hand through his hair which bounced back into place.
‘You see, something happened before,’ he said eventually.
Hannah studied him. Was she dealing with mental health here? If so she was unqualified, except for her own fucked-up experience. Maybe she should refer him to someone else.
‘How do you mean?’ Hannah said.
José gulped down some tea. ‘When I was an undergrad in Seville. I was already involved in the Planet Hunters project back then.’
‘With the TESS data?’
‘It was early days. I examined chunks of data looking for evidence of planets in a tiny section of sky. The data they have is incredible.’
Hannah’s coffee was about right now. A toddler across the café smacked his sister over the head with a picture book, the mum nonchalantly taking it off him without breaking chat with her friend.
‘I don’t understand why NASA don’t analyse all the data themselves,’ Hannah said. ‘Why hand it out to anyone?’
‘There’s just too much. And there’s no algorithm accurate enough to analyse the data. It takes a human eye going through it. You know how it works?’
Hannah nodded. She’d checked out the website, how they were looking at the light curves of two hundred thousand stars, searching for dips that suggested a planet transiting in front. But it depended on size and brightness of the star, size of the planet, angle of rotation, and then most stars existed in double or triple systems orbiting each other. Then there were starspots and pulsating stars, which varied the light curve again. It got complex very quickly, and the slightest variations in data could mean something.
‘What about the simulation data?’
The project ran simulations and threw that data into the world too, unmarked, to see what people could find. They didn’t tell them till afterwards to avoid bias.
‘This isn’t simulation data, I’ve already checked,’ José said, hands moving in front of him. ‘And anyway, it’s unlike the normal light-curve data.’
José fell silent and Hannah resisted the urge to fill the silence. She was from a generation who were used to constant noise, continual communication on five levels at once, and quiet was a good tool with folk who weren’t used to it. José was taking a long time getting to the details of this alleged gaslighting.
‘You know about FRBs?’ he said.
Hannah did, they touched on it in her undergrad astronomy class, but she kept her face blank. ‘Remind me.’
‘Fast radio bursts are transient pulses of energy that last a few milliseconds and happen periodically. No one is sure what their origins are but there’s plenty of speculation, black holes, pulsars, neutron stars, even blitzars and cosmic strings.’
Hannah sipped coffee. She kept her body still although she liked the buzz of technical physics, stuff she couldn’t discuss properly with anyone except other students.
‘And you’ve detected some in the TESS data?’
José nodded, looked down at his hands, then eventually back up. ‘The thing is, I can’t tell anyone because of what happened before.’
Hannah waited with the cup at her lips.
‘At Seville Uni I found some FRBs in free-shared data.’
‘That seems quite a coincidence,’ Hannah said.
José looked sheepish. ‘There have only been two hundred in the last twenty years, all detected by major observatories.’
Hannah looked around the café, at the kids covered in crumbs and milk, the mums multitasking alongside, a young woman Hannah’s age working the machine behind the counter, seascapes on the wall. She glanced out at the traffic, imagined Whiskers leaping through the window, glass everywhere, gripping Hannah’s throat in her jaws and tearing until her head came off her body. This was only five minutes from where she saw the cat, the beast had to be somewhere. But there were lots of large gardens around here, bushes and hedges to rest under until darkness.
She turned back to José. ‘What happened last time?’
‘I was a fool,’ José said. ‘I made a big noise about it. Told my supervisors, student friends, ended up in the local paper.’
His head went down.
‘And?’ Hannah said, touching her throat and feeling the pulse underneath, imagining Whiskers lapping up her blood.
‘The microwave oven in the canteen,’ José said. ‘It was the same frequency. Someone had a habit of opening the door before the timer finished. We correlated the two, it fitted perfectly.’
Hannah finished her coffee and wondered about this whole thing. Was it even a case? Or maybe just a way to stay connected to the world of astrophysics before she began her PhD.
‘Oh,’ she said.
José raised his head and she could see veins throbbing in his forehead and neck.
‘But this is different,’ he said. ‘The frequency of the bursts is different from any household appliances, anything human.’
‘There could be something you’ve missed.’
‘And there’s something else,’ José said. ‘They pulse at certain ratios. It’s Morse code.’
‘Morse code?’ Hannah said.
‘Exactly, why would aliens send a message in Morse code? That’s how I know it’s not real.’
Hannah felt the hairs on the back of her neck, maybe this was a case after all.
‘What does the message say?’
José looked at her and held her gaze for a long time.
‘“We’re coming”,’ he said.