THE BURST AND TRANSIENT SOURCE EXPERIMENT

The university corridors were long and winding. The high arched walls of the outside quickly disappeared to high, polished wood panels, which in turn gave way to white-paneled walls, white-paneled floors, and white-paneled ceilings.

This deep inside the university, the corridors branched frequently and unexpectedly.

The maze of corridors would have stymied Tane, but Rebecca had been there a few times to visit her dad, when he’d worked there, before the accident.

Rebecca’s father had been one of the brightest minds in the Earth Science department at the university. Some said the only brighter mind was that of his wife. Rebecca’s mother.

His car had been crushed by a furniture truck that had failed to take a bend. The truck driver was a sensible, experienced, and sober driver. He just took a bend a fraction too fast one day and killed Rebecca’s father.

Rebecca was familiar enough with the layout to understand the rather confusing array of small blue signs posted on the walls at corners as they hurried down the long passageways to a pair of white-paneled double doors marked GEOPHYSICS LAB.

Rebecca caught Tane by the arm. “Let me do the talking, and agree with everything I say,” she said.

“Are you sure you should be doing this?” Tane asked. He’d asked the same question a couple of times at school that day and had gotten pretty much the same answer, but he asked it again anyway. “I mean, with the house and everything.”

It was Friday, and after spending most of the week straightening out her family’s bills, it did seem a little odd that she was now spending energy on what was really nothing more than a whimsical conversation they’d had while lying on a platform at night on Lake Sunnyvale.

Then again, he thought, maybe it took her mind off her worries.

“I already told you,” Rebecca said. “After we move to Masterton, I won’t have the opportunity to do this. This is the only lab in the entire country that has access to live feeds from BATSE.”

Tane still had no idea why they needed live feeds from BATSE, or even what on earth BATSE was, and he wasn’t even really sure he wanted to know; but Rebecca had promised to explain it all in very simple terms, “terms that even an artist can understand,” she’d said, after they had the data. Which was what they were here for.

She pushed open the doors, and they stepped into the lab, which didn’t look like a lab at all. Whatever Tane had been expecting, it was not simply a row of desks with a computer on each one.

A balding man with gray hair and beard and narrow, wire-framed glasses looked up from his desk and rose to greet them. He looked very much the image of a university scientist, which of course he was.

“Rebecca,” he said warmly. “You’ve grown.” He looked as though he didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her hand, so ended up doing neither.

“This is my good friend Tane,” Rebecca said, and the man shook Tane’s hand; then, as if that had made his mind up, he shook Rebecca’s as well. She continued, “Tane, this is Professor Barnes. He used to work with my dad.”

“How’s your mum?” Barnes asked.

“She’s…okay. She’s fine.”

“So, Rebecca, how can I help you?” the professor asked after a moment or two longer of meaningless small talk. “You said something about a piece of art? But I couldn’t work out what that has to do with geophysics.”

Rebecca smiled. “Tane is an artist, and a very good one, and he has this great idea of creating a piece of art from transmissions from the depths of space. Sort of an ‘art of the universe’ thing. It’s kind of hard to explain.” She gave Barnes a look as if to say, “Artists, you know.”

“I see. I think,” Barnes mused, and turned to Tane. “Any particular kind of transmissions you had in mind? There are a lot of them, you know.”

Rebecca cut in before Tane would feel that he had to answer. “I was telling him about BATSE and the gamma-ray bursts. Tane felt that we could use the raw data from one of those bursts and model it digitally to create visual patterns in the computer.”

Barnes looked confused. “Well, I suppose that could be considered as art. Actually, I paint a little myself. Landscapes, still lifes, that sort of thing. I have quite an original technique using flat knives. Maybe that would be of use to you, too. I could take some photographs and e-mail them to you. There is one painting in particular—”

“That would be great.” Rebecca cut him off with such a wide smile that it didn’t seem at all rude. “And the BATSE data?”

Barnes considered for a moment, then said, “Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm. As long as you’re only using it for artistic purposes. We’re the only lab in the country that has access to live feeds of this data, you know.”

“Really?” Rebecca said, wide-eyed. “I didn’t know that.”

“There was a burst this morning. I downloaded the data a few moments ago. It’s all just bits and bytes, though. Raw numbers, if you know what I mean. Are you sure that will be of any use to you?”

“Oh yes. We’ll put it into some imaging software that will create representations of it, no problem,” Rebecca said.

“Very well, then, I’ll write it onto a disk for you.” He disappeared through an unmarked door at the back of the lab and reappeared a few moments later with a CD.

“You promise you won’t let anyone else have a copy of this? It’s not top secret, but the data is copyrighted; it belongs to NASA.”

Rebecca said sweetly, “Who on earth would I give it to?” She took the CD from Barnes’s outstretched hand and passed it straight to Tane.

         

The data made no sense to Tane at all. It was as Barnes had described, just long strings of ones and zeros. Raw computer data. But he also didn’t understand Rebecca’s explanation of what this was all about.

He lay on his bed, watching her tap carefully at the keyboard on his study desk. They were at Tane’s house because he had a new and powerful computer. Tane knew Rebecca envied his computer and resented a bit the fact that he mainly used it to play games. Rebecca didn’t have a computer at all.

“Okay, try and stay with me on this,” she said, adding a line of code to the computer program she was working on. Tane concentrated furiously on her face, in the hope that by doing so, he might somehow “stay with her on this.”

“I did some reading about quantum foam, and I found out that scientists think it may be possible to detect the stuff, if it exists, by looking for fluctuations in these gamma-ray bursts.”

She stopped, staring at her code for a moment, then added a pair of brackets around part of an equation.

“Go back a bit,” Tane said. “What are gamma-ray bursts, and where do they come from?

“Okay. They are explosions of a type of radiation called gamma rays, which are a bit like X-rays or radio waves but with an extremely short wavelength.”

That didn’t help Tane a bit, but he nodded as if it did.

Rebecca continued, “Nobody knows what causes them, but they seem to come from all over the galaxy. In 1991, NASA sent up a satellite called the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. It has an instrument on it called the Burst and Transient Source Experiment.”

“BATSE!” Tane exclaimed.

“Right, BATSE. It’s the most sensitive detector of gamma rays in the world. What we have on this disk is data from a burst of gamma rays that was received by BATSE this morning. It’s probably just random data from random gamma waves. But if the quantum foam scientists are correct, then the gamma rays could be affected by the quantum foam, and therefore, theoretically, and don’t ask me how, it could be possible for someone in the future to transmit a message using these fluctuations in the gamma rays.”

“Nope,” Tane said. “You lost me at BATSE.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll analyze the data and look for patterns. That’s what this program is for. If we find them, great. If not, well, it was a wild idea to start with.”

She pressed a couple of keys on the keyboard and said, “Hold your breath.”

Tane looked at the screen and waited, but apart from a single, flashing cursor, nothing was happening.

“What’s it doing?” he asked.

“My program looks for patterns. It could take a while, though; there is a lot of data to look through, and the patterns could be quite complex. But if it finds a series of numbers that form a definable pattern, it will stop and we’ll be able to look at it.”

“Okay, cool,” Tane said, although he had really been hoping that it would have been flashing colors and weird patterns on the screen as it worked, a bit like the ambience patterns you got on Windows Media Player.

They watched the flashing cursor for a bit, but it got very boring very quickly.

“Why wouldn’t NASA have found these patterns?” he asked after a while.

“They’re not looking for them,” she said. “They’re trying to find out what causes the bursts. They think it might be two neutron stars colliding, or maybe a neutron star being swallowed by a black hole.”

“Really,” Tane said, nodding his head and wondering what on earth she was talking about.

“There are some scientists from Texas who are looking for fluctuations, but they’re trying to prove the existence of quantum foam, and they’re still trying to work out what a quantum gravity signature would look like. Nobody is looking for messages in the rays.”

“Just us.”

“As far as I know.”

Tane watched the cursor for a while longer, then turned and looked at his friend, looking at the cursor. Her eyes never left the computer screen.

He had known Rebecca all of his life. A lot of people said things like that, but in their case it was true. They shared the same birthday, and their mothers had shared a maternity ward at the hospital. They had even lived close to each other in those very early years, before Tane’s father’s career had taken off and he and Tane’s mum had built the big house amongst the trees up in the mountains. Tane and Rebecca had played together in kindergarten and now went to the same high school. For nearly fifteen years, there had never been a time when he had not known the spiky-haired girl sitting next to him.

“I’m going to miss you when you go to Masterton,” he said.

Rebecca said quickly, “Don’t forget the march tomorrow. We need to get down to the station before nine to catch the bus into the city.”

“I’ll set my alarm clock,” Tane promised.