[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Of course, if you were to discover the first thousand or ten thousand digits of π, to any number base, in a signal received from space, that would be another matter.It would provide proof, without doubt and without the need for any other information, that an alien intelligence was broadcasting to the universe.Milly had known all that, long before she applied for a position with Project Argus.It was also a safe bet that the Argus computers, billions of times faster and more accurate than any human, were screening for untold millions of digit sequences drawn from pure mathematics and physics.So what did this leave for humans to do? Exactly what Milly was doing now: using the human ability, so far unmatched by any machine, to see patterns.Every morning, the mill produced a variable number of signals with some element of strangeness.Every morning, eighteen humans in their separate cubicles were provided a quota of data sets for individual examination.No one in the analysis group knew how many signals the mill produced on any particular day for human inspection, and all assumed that on some occasions two or more people would be given the same data.In principle no data set was more than one day old, but Hannah Krauss had told Milly that new arrivals would often in their first weeks be given an old anomaly, to see what they made of it.Jack Beston calibrated and compared the quality of people as well as signals.He was more than an Ogre, he was a paranoid Ogre.Milly and her fellow-workers at the Argus Station could eat together if they wished and interact socially as much as they liked.What they were not supposed to do, ever, was compare notes about their work.Anomalies were not to be advertised, nor were they a subject for group discussion.They were to be reported directly to Jack Beston.The data for individual analysis were divided into what on the L-4 station were known as “cells.” As Milly pulled in the first cell of the day, she reflected that she too might as well be in a cell.Worse than that, she was in solitary confinement.The cubicle to her left was occupied by a mournful-faced woman in her middle fifties who apparently had no other existence than work.Lota Danes was never in the dining area, and no matter how early Milly came to her cubicle, the door of the neighboring cubicle was always closed and the red sign outside showed that it was occupied.The hyperactive man who sat on Milly’s other side was at the other extreme of behavior.Simon Bitters kept random hours, popped in and out of his cubicle all the time, stuck his head now and again into Milly’s own little partition, placed his right index finger on the end of his nose, then ducked out again without a word.He apparently spent the whole of his working days wandering the station.Milly wondered how he ever fulfilled his daily quota.But apparently he did, otherwise Jack Beston would have shredded him at the weekly review meetings.“You’ll be a long way from home,” her stepfather had said, just before Milly left Ganymede.“Make friends there, so you won’t feel lonely.”Sure.But how, with eccentrics like these?Maybe Milly was one herself.This wasn’t what she had expected when she signed up to come to the L-4 location and the Argus Project, but Hannah Krauss’s warning after her first couple of weeks in some ways matched her stepfather’s.“The work here is challenging and interesting, but it’s lonely.Try to make friends, and find activities outside your work.Do you know the occupational hazards of mathematicians, logicians, and cryptanalysts?”“Depression?”“Depression, yes.Also insanity, paranoia, and suicide.And isolation increases the odds.”Now they warned you, when you were already here.Milly examined the screen in front of her.She could process the cell that she had just loaded in endless different ways.It came in as a long string of binary digits, anything from a million to billions of 1’s and 0’s.She could transform that to any number base, introduce any breaks that she liked, look for repeating strings, present the data factored into two- or three-dimensional arrays, transform the results to polar or cylindrical or any other orthogonal set of coordinates, examine the Fourier transforms and power spectra of the result, cross-correlate any section with any other, compute the sequence or image entropy, seek size or shape invariants, and display any or all of those results in a wide variety of formats.In the first few days she had developed her own preferred suite of processes, with a shell of operations to run their sequence automatically.All she had to do was sit, observe the results, and allow her imagination to run free in its search for oddities, or—there was always hope—meaningful patterns.While she worked, spectral figures from the past wandered through Milly’s mind.They were her heroes and heroines.Here was Thomas Young, the universally gifted nineteenth-century Englishman who moved so easily from medicine to physics to linguistics.He had taken the multi-language inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone to gain a first handle on interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics.The polymath Young had dismissed his work casually, as “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” Here was the Frenchman, Jean-François Champollion, finishing the work that Young had begun, and writing his book on the subject that had so fascinated Milly at seventeen—the same age at which Champollion had been made a full professor at Grenoble.A century later than Champollion, the quiet American classicist Alice Kober had patiently begun to unravel the mysteries of the Cretan language, Linear B, work that after her early death was completed by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick.By Chadwick’s side, as a fellow worker at an English classified facility during wartime, stood the enigmatic and tragic figure of Alan Turing.Turing, with his rumpled clothes, dirty nails, and unshaven face, had been a nonpareil cryptanalyst, as well as the godfather of all the computers that now surrounded Milly.His life had ended with the suicide that Hannah Krauss warned of for workers in cryptanalysis.Behind Turing, a century earlier, stood another computer godfather, Charles Babbage, himself a noted cryptanalyst who had cracked the “unbreakable” Vigenère cipher and who straddled the line between genius and eccentricity.The godmother for Milly’s own field, the interpretation of signals from the stars, had been born a generation later than Turing.Jocelyn Bell, when she was no older than Milly herself, sat alone day after day and night after night studying radio telescope signals, until one day she came across curious repeating patterns of electronic noise that she had named “scruff.” For a time, Jocelyn Bell and her research supervisor believed that what she had found was what Milly now longed so desperately to see: synthetic signals from far across the galaxy, sent by intelligent beings.They even—in private if not in public—called them “LGM objects,” the initials standing for Little Green Men [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]