Unknown Values

The light blinked in a steady pattern: one two one four one. Emily stared at the blue dash and frowned.

“What does it mean?” she asked Lloyd.

The lab tech shrugged without looking up from his clipboard.

“Unknown value” he responded. “They’re always sending messages like that. It’ll stop as soon as another notices and blows it up.”

“Don’t you wonder why they do that?”

“Nope.” Lloyd finished his notations and looked up at Emily. “I don’t get paid to wonder; I’m just here to record.” He rolled his chair over to the next station of blinking lights.

One two one four one. Emily tried to puzzle out what the pattern might indicate. Letters? A B A D A. “Abada,” she said under her breath, then shook her head. That was stupid. They wouldn’t even use our alphabet. One two one four one. She couldn’t think of anything mathematically significant about the numbers. They didn’t build on each other, as in doubling with each succession. They weren’t all prime numbers. They were five numbers that added up to – Emily did the math in her head – added up to nine. No clue in that.

Emily stared at the instrument panel, willing the blinking blue light to yield its secrets to her. One two one four one. One two one four one. One two one four one. One two one four one. One two one four …

All of a sudden the light stopped blinking entirely. Emily straightened in surprise.

“Lloyd!” she called to the lab tech. “Lloyd, this one stopped blinking!”

“What did I tell you?” his voice came back in a disinterested tone. “The others blew it up. Another sequence will take its place in a few minutes.”

Emily regarded the dead light with curiosity and sadness. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way. It was ridiculous to get attached to a stupid blinking light with a pattern of one two one four one. Still, that light had represented something, and that something was no longer there. Emily wondered if anyone else in the universe would miss it.

“Hey, Emily!”

“What?”

Lloyd gestured with his pencil.

“Are you going to empty those trashes or what?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

The janitor wheeled her cart past the bank of lights to the desk in the middle of the lab and picked up a mesh wastebasket beneath.

“Lloyd,” Emily balanced the trashcan on the edge of her cart, “once their light goes out, are they really dead?”

“Might as well be. We never see them again.”

Emily made a moue of dissatisfaction at his answer. “That’s sloppy reasoning. Maybe they change form.” Like a butterfly. “Or moved beyond range of the sensors?”

Lowering his clipboard, Lloyd threw an exasperated look at the janitor. “Look, your guess is as good as anyone’s. The researchers still don’t know if the energy signatures are even sentient. This could be the deep space equivalent of a bush I’m monitoring. So I have no idea what causes a sig to stop, okay?”

“Then why did you say they blow each other up?”

“Because it sounds more exciting. Like a game of Battleship. This is really boring, Emily.”

The chair spun pertly as Lloyd pointedly turned back to his indicator panel and raised the clipboard again. With a sigh, Emily dumped the wastebasket’s contents into her bin.

Walls of metal indicator panels rose like a cityscape around her. As Emily pondered the scattering of solid blue lights, like windows of a high-rise, one of the lights started blinking. She counted the pattern. One three five.

Maybe it was better not to know. After all, not all messages were welcome, like the one Emily had received from the institute yesterday denying her internship application. With the note, Emily felt like her own light had started to blink, like emptying the lab’s trash would be the closest she ever came to joining the program.

One three five. The little sequence flashed like a countdown timer on a bomb, heading toward imminent destruction. What message was so important to be worth death, the janitor wondered. One three five. A C E. Like abada, ace added up to nine. Was there something significant about nine? Had a square root of three. A prime number. Emily didn’t know what to do with that.

Maybe the scientists had misinterpreted the meaning of these energy patterns. Maybe the sigs weren’t sending messages. Maybe the blips were a cry for the universe to notice them before they expired. Or maybe they were trying to puzzle out the mystery of their existence, too.

One three five. Abada had started with the number one. Emily opened her mouth to ask Lloyd if all the sequences began that way, when a sudden change made her jaw go slack.

“Lloyd!”

“What?”

“Come here!” As the lab technician rolled up the aisleway, Emily pointed to the bank of indicator lights. “Look!”

Lloyd’s clipboard dropped with a clatter as he shot up from the chair.

“It turned green,” Emily said unnecessarily. “What does that mean?”

The tech’s eyes goggled. He shook his head. “I didn’t even know the indicator lights could change color. The only thing the sigs have ever done is blink.”

A tingle of electric excitement shot up Emily’s spine. She could tell a matching energy had infected Lloyd as he fumbled for a pen from the desk.

“I need to record this sequence.” The lab tech snatched his clipboard from the floor and began scribbling shakily. “Emily, count the iterations.”

With a giddy grin, she obliged, marking the count on her fingers. One three five. One three five. One three five …

Two people had never been so excited to watch a light blink as the pair of pioneers that was Lloyd and Emily. They had hitched their wagon to a star and ridden its flaming tail deep into the far reaches of the galaxy. Here, in the wee hours of the morning, a lowly lab tech and a moonlighting janitor were witnessing history in the-

Ace’s green light flashed out. A cry of dismay burst from Emily’s throat.

Lloyd swallowed hard, crestfallen but doing his best to maintain a professional attitude. “How … how many iterations was that?”

“Fourteen,” Emily answered with a sigh. “And a half.”

The technician nodded and noted the count. “I should call Dr. Minchhaus,” he murmured, reaching for the phone on the desk. Emily glanced away so Lloyd wouldn’t see tears glistening in her eyes.

“There’s another one!”

Emily’s head whipped around at Lloyd’s exclamation. She scrambled after him to another bank of indicators, stepping on the tech’s heels as he came to a stop to stare at a single green light blinking within a sea of solid blue.

One three five, Emily counted. Inexplicably, her heart expanded until it felt too big for her chest.

“The same sequence,” Lloyd gasped. “We’ve never had a pattern reoccur before.”

He seemed likely to float to the ceiling. A sense of surrealness made Emily lightheaded as well. Something momentous was contained in that unassuming green blink. She felt its energy signature was no longer something restrained to the vast reaches of outer space, but had stretched across the interminable distance to touch this place where they stood, like one hand reaching out across a gulf for another.

“Lloyd, do you think it’s trying to communicate with us?”

“Of course not. They’re not even aware of our observations.” But what if? the glance he shared with Emily seemed to glint. Wouldn’t that be exciting?

The light went dark again.

“How many iterations?”

“Twelve,” the janitor answered, turning a circle. “Where’d it go? It has to be here somewhere.”

Spotting another green light across the lab at the same time, Lloyd and Emily tripped over each other in their hurry to get to the panel.

“One three five.” Bathed in a blue aura of indicator lights, the technician’s face registered awe as he whispered ace’s sequence. “You really think it knows we’re here?”

“Don’t you feel it?” Emily responded in the same hushed tones. “That energy?”

With her focus narrowed to exclude all from her vision but the green wink of one three five, the midnight custodian felt an echoing glow pulsing in her soul so strong that she couldn’t have said if the energy fueling that flashing indicator came from somewhere out in the cosmos or from within her own body.

Ace blinked out again.

Emily blinked. Lloyd was already racing to another quadrant.

“I forgot to count iterations,” Emily confessed as she came up behind him.

“Ten and a third. They’re getting shorter.”

Emily’s eyes widened. In echo of her own speeding pulse, the one three five sequence increased tempo. Like a frantic heartbeat.

“Lloyd, I think it’s being chased.”

“Chased? By whom?”

“I don’t know. The others? To stop it from reaching us?”

The lab tech gaped at her briefly before turning his attention back to the indicator array.

After its eighth iteration, the green light went dark. Panic dizzied Emily as she spun, searching out ace.

“There!” Lloyd pointed.

Six iterations. The blink shifted left one panel.

“Three and a third.” Emily’s voice shook. Ace jumped to another quadrant on the same bank.

One three fi-.

There was no five.

Like children playing a frantic game of hide-and-seek, Emily and Lloyd raced up and down the lab, but found no green light, no pattern of one three five. The sig had been snuffed out for good this time.

Lloyd collapsed into his rolling chair. “The researchers are going to go nuts.” He giggled with slaphappy energy. “I can’t even begin to make sense of … Are you crying?”

Emily shook her head. Not to deny the tears refracting the lab’s blue radiance in her eyes, but because she had no words to make the technician understand why she mourned a blinking green light. He would say she had anthropomorphized it.

How could Emily possibly quantify the significance that one insignificant, unseen energy signature had held for her?

Before she could even attempt to explain – either to herself or to Lloyd – a third of the indicators flashed an alarming red, and with scarcely a moment between, every indicator light in the lab suddenly flared a triumphant, vital green.

The verdant hue reflected off every metal panel, every reflective surface, even the faux-leather armrests and the linoleum floor tiles, dashing out its signature sequence: one three five. One three five, Emily counted. Her spirits skyrocketed.

After ace’s third iteration, every light in every bank abruptly went dark, leaving the lab in a dingy bath of florescent light. Mouths agape, Emily and Lloyd waited, speechless.

Finally, his eyes round as flying saucers, the tech leaned forward and flicked some switches. The indicator panels remained inactive.

“Dr. Minchaus won’t believe this,” Lloyd moaned. He screwed his face into an imitation of the head researcher. “‘This wasn’t a breakthrough, it was a breakdown,’ he’ll say. You need to go, Emily. He’ll say you broke something. He’ll say I let you touch something and you caused a massive glitch. Go on, get out of here.”

Emily stumbled to her janitor cart. “I’ll just … clean the bathrooms now.” Breathless, she wheeled the bin toward the lab door. “Bye, Lloyd,” she said to the frantically muttering technician.

“I have to re-sequence the indicators. Gather data, get some printouts …”

Emily exited the lab, wheeling her cart toward the restrooms. It should feel a let-down that life go on as normal after something so momentous; instead, Emily tingled with a burgeoning awareness of the infinite significance of every iota of each life.

She wouldn’t give up on her ambitions of joining the program, Emily decided. After all, she had an ace up her sleeve. The janitor wiped the bathroom mirrors, her heart beating a rhythm of one three five. One three five.