I wrote today’s story for Round 2 of the 2020 NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge; an explanation of how this works can be found above my Round 1 story, ‘On Concurrent Cake Decoration for Divorce Ceremonies’. This time, I didn’t make it to the next round, but that’s okay - the competition was great at forcing me to write outside my box (or at all). The prompt, this time, was romance for the genre, isolation for the topic, and a graphic designer for the character. Without further ado:

SETI in the Age of Loneliness

Lachlan Marnoch, 2020

Arzu was early to work, but her appointment was already waiting for her in the meeting room.

“Doctor Rostami?”

“Oh… um. Yes. Arzu is fine.”

She found herself a little short of breath. Must have been the walk. Nothing to do with the stunning woman in front of her.

“Olivia Suen. Nice to meet you.”

“Ah - nice to meet you too.”

They shared a brief bow and took seats at the table. Olivia was dressed in a style reminiscent of current fashion, but with enough creative tweaks to suggest a certain autonomy. Arzu was suddenly very conscious of her own jeans and Adventure Time t-shirt.

“Sorry to call you in here like this. It must be pretty unusual.”

“No, it’s interesting! A bit of a break from my routine. Usually I work from home, just communicate through email. I’ve never been to a proper science lab before.”

Arzu laughed.

“It’s nothing too exciting. Just an office hardwired to some radio telescopes.”

“Oh, I saw those! Are those the ones your group is using?”

“Ah, no, actually, the dishes outside are pretty old, mostly just for show at this point. We’re using the Square Kilometre Array. Part of it’s out west in WA, the other half is in South Africa. It’s aging a bit too, but it’s still a great piece of kit. We were very lucky to get time on it. We being SMODER.”

Olivia was jotting down notes on her tablet.

“So. SMODER. Tell me about it.”

“Okay. It stands for Solving the Modified Drake Equation with Radio. Do you know the Drake Equation?”

“Heard of it. A bit fuzzy on the details.”

There was a whiteboard nearby. Arzu scooped up a marker and dove into presentation mode, writing:

$ N = R_* \cdot f_p \cdot n_e \cdot f_l \cdot f_i \cdot f_c \cdot L $

“This is the Drake Equation. It’s for estimating the number of alien civilizations we might communicate with. Strictly speaking, it only describes our galaxy, but we can generalise it to the universe at large - with some assumptions.”

She crossed out a couple of letters and replaced one.

“We call that the Modified Drake Equation. Now that biosignatures are confirmed on a handful of exoplanets, we’re starting to get a handle on most of the terms. We know there’s other life in the universe now. But we haven’t found any other intelligent life. That’s this term, $f_i$. It’s the fraction of life-supporting planets that will evolve a civilization. Aliens we might be able to talk to.”

Olivia was rapt. “And that’s what your group is working on?”

Arzu nodded. “There’s this amazing new neurophysical model out. It links the formation of complex neurology to anisotropies in dark energy density. Crazy stuff, but it’s plausible, and if we prove it out it’s easily worth another Nobel Prize.

“Now, a proxy of these anisotropies is a certain polarisation pattern at some wavelengths. We’ve written a new observing mode for the Array to search for that in the radio. We can, in theory, use it to put upper bounds on the number density of civilizations in the universe.”

Behind her glasses – a good deal more stylish than Arzu’s – Olivia’s eyes were fixed on the equation.

“Wow. This is amazing stuff. So, let me guess – you’re hoping to build up a public image, so you need a graphic designer like me to make a logo for you?”

“Exactly.”

“I would be honoured.”

Arzu escorted Olivia out of the complex.

“It was lovely to meet you, Arzu. Hopefully we’ll see each other again soon.”

A touch flustered, Arzu’s speech centre got away from her somewhat.

“Sorry again for bringing you out here. The rest of the team is a bit touchy about leaks. It’s all very exciting. I’m going to be taking the first observations tonight.”

“Oh, wow. You’re flying to Western Australia?”

“No, no. Remotely, from here. I’m the duty astronomer and the observer. I’ll probably get out around two.”

“That must be exhausting. And lonely.”

Olivia paused, and turned.

“I’m free tonight. What if I come along and we toss around ideas for the logo?”

“Oh no, you don’t want to do that!”

“I do, actually! I’d love to see a radio telescope in action. Even remotely.”

Arzu swayed. She wasn’t strictly sure visitors were allowed in the operations centre, but she really didn’t want to say no.

“I’ll bring coffee!”

Arzu grinned. “Alright, then. See you here at 8.”

Olivia, true to her word, had a keep-cup in each hand. There was something very interesting about the way she moved, something lithe and graceful but without any hint of self-consciousness. She grinned. Arzu’s chest fluttered just a little.

Arzu swiped them both in and they took seats in the operations centre. While Arzu prepared for the handover from last shift, Olivia slid her tablet out and opened some sketches.

“Alright. Logos, logos. It’s a challenge. Very abstract. Hard to represent visually. I don’t want to resort to a bug-eyed alien head. Could we work the Drake Equation in somehow?”

Arzu tilted her head.

“Hmmm. It’s not terribly aesthetic. Just a string of factors. None of the beauty of Maxwell’s Equations.”

“Sure. I definitely know what that means. Okay, what about just $f_i$?”

“That could work…”

Olivia sketched something on her tablet. Arzu looked back at the screen. Uneventful. Telescopes taking data. A whole lot of data, to be sure - petabytes of the stuff - but just ones and zeroes. Conditions fine, not much radio interference, not enough wind to have to worry about the dishes blowing over.

At Olivia’s request, Arzu explained what each of the Equation's terms represented. Olivia jotted notes and sketches while she was talking. Arzu noticed that she had the habit of putting the end of her stylus to her lips while she thought. There was something inexplicably attractive about it. She shifted in her seat. Olivia looked up, and Arzu didn’t look away in time. The graphic designer smiled, impish.

“Lotta late nights in astronomy?”

“Oh yeah. Even when you’re not observing. Lots to do.”

“Isn’t there anyone at home to miss you?”

Olivia was looking down at her tablet as she said this. Arzu might have said her tone was just a little too casual. But no. You’re deluding yourself.

“Just my budgies. Malon and Talon.”

“Budgies?”

“Budgerigars. Parakeets. Little parrots.”

Olivia’s face spread into a grin that was almost startling in how pretty it was.

“Aw! I love birds. I want to meet them.”

Arzu tried very hard not to imagine Olivia in her cramped apartment meeting her budgies. Or on her cramped bed or eating breakfast at her cramped table wrapped in nothing but her bedsheets.

“Ahem. Ah. I love them too! I had a budgie when I was a kid, Kass. He was the loveliest little bird, so friendly, and he knew a few phrases in Spanish and Persian. That’s why I got Malon. It was the last year of my PhD, and I really needed the company. Research can be lonely.”

Olivia was gazing at Arzu, stylus down. Arzu wasn’t sure why words were flowing so freely from her own mouth – normally, making conversation was the hardest part of her day.

“But I just wasn’t home enough. That year, I don't think there was a single day I left the office before midnight. We never really bonded like I did with Kass. I couldn’t bear the thought of Malon alone all day – they’re very social birds – so I bought Talon soon after. They fell in love straight away. They pretty much have free run of the apartment, since I'm barely there; they only really go in their cage to sleep and eat. They don’t take much notice of me anymore.”

Olivia's face was filled with sympathy.

“That’s a shame.”

Arzu shrugged.

“At least they’re happy.”

Her lip trembled, just a little. There was a pause.

“How about you? Any pets?”

The astronomer and the graphic designer talked for hours, logo forgotten. Arzu found herself, to her surprise, totally energised. This was not just the coffee. She hadn’t talked to anyone for this long in years, and was beginning to realise how much she had needed it.

“This town is so empty at night, I noticed on the way here. So different to Copenhagen. It doesn’t matter what time you walk out there, there are always people around. Cafés are open until eleven.”

Tablet down, Olivia’s arm was slung over the back of her chair, in a manner, which, as if by accident, couldn’t help but emphasise her figure. Arzu was doing her level best to avoid staring.

“It takes a bit of getting used to. Life here is a different pace.”

“It’s a bit scary, honestly. It reminds me of when I was a kid, of that big outbreak.”

Arzu nodded.

“How old were you? I was six when it started.”

“My fifth birthday was during the lockdown. It was so lonely, the whole thing.”

Arzu pondered this.

“I think, if I’m honest with myself, that I’m lonelier now than I was then. At least, then, I was with my family.”

Arzu suddenly realised, with a stab of self-consciousness, that this quiet musing might be perceived as sympathy-fishing. She looked up quickly; Olivia’s face was full of quiet compassion.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m okay. I’m sorry it was so lonely for you.”

Olivia smiled. There was quiet for a minute or two. It was a comfortable silence, one neither felt the need to break.

“The pandemic is kind of the reason I got into astronomy,” said Arzu after a time.

Olivia’s head turned. “Tell me about it.”

“My family lived in Santiago. Terrible smog. Light pollution wasn’t great either. But during the lockdown, no-one was driving, the factories all closed. It gave the pollution time to clear out. I remember this one night, the moon was down, and there was this huge blackout, all over the city. Dad took me up San Cristóbal. He was so nervous breaking quarantine, the cops had all these emergency powers, and our skin was a couple of shades darker than average there. But it was important to him, that I saw this. It was so dark up there, the darkest I’d ever seen, but the sky was so bright. I remember the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, and… dad says I didn’t speak for almost an hour. But then I asked him – ‘are there people up there?’ He told me he hoped so. I said I wanted to meet them.”

Olivia watched her. She waited a few seconds, in case there was more, then spoke.

“It’s amazing. Everyone that was alive then remembers the crisis, from billions of different perspectives. I like hearing those stories. It’s this universal touchstone for our generation, you know? Our parents lived through it, but we lived in it. It changed them, but it became a part of us. Right?”

Arzu was nodding slowly. Olivia continued.

“I was supposed to start school that year. But I had to stay home instead. That’s when I learned to draw. I played with colours and shapes and put surprising things together. I hated everything that was happening, but drawing was an escape. From the virus, from the lockdown, from my parents yelling at each other.”

Arzu opened her mouth, searching for words of comfort. Nothing came.

“It didn’t help that we were Chinese in Europe. Even I noticed the looks we got, after the virus started spreading. Like we were plague rats. Some couples, that pressure made them stronger. Not my folks. They divorced a few months after the lockdown ended.”

Her eyes were far away. Arzu felt she had to say something.

“Olivia? Are you okay?”

Her eyes came back into focus with a smile.

“Olivia is just my Western name. My birth name is Yujiao.”

“Oh! That’s lovely. Suen Yujiao? You should go by that more!”

“Yeah, well, you know what it’s like getting white people to pronounce your name.”

“Ah. Yeah.”

Their eyes found each other.

“But you can call me Yujiao. I like the way you say it.”

Arzu cursed her treacherous cheeks, which felt like they must have been glowing. Their hands had been brushing on the desk for some time – although the contact had seemed incidental at first, it had gone on too long to have been entirely by accident. Yujiao’s skin was very warm. Arzu turned her hand over so that the back was leaning subtly on Yujiao’s. Her heart was thumping.

“You’re pretty keen on finding aliens, huh?

Arzu barked a laugh. “What gave it away?”

“Your eyes really light up when you’re talking about that stuff. It’s sweet.”

Arzu blushed deeper.

“I got into radioastronomy as kind of a side-door into SETI. Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. I think I… kind of need there to be someone else out there. If there isn’t, then what’s the point? If we’re just… alone in the universe. If there’s nobody else to talk to, nobody to connect to. It… that thought… it really terrifies me.”

She found herself, without warning, on the verge of tears. There was a pain in her chest that hadn’t been there before. Yujiao moved her hand away. Disappointed, Arzu began to withdraw hers, but Yujiao caught it and deftly wove their fingers together.

“But we’re not alone.”

They shared their first kiss as they left the office, beneath the soft glow of the Milky Way.